Understanding Four Views on the Lord's Supper by Russell D. Moore, I. John Hesselink, David P. Scaer, and Thomas A. Baima
The Open Volume
Thoughtful Reviews in Theology and Ministry
Understanding Four Views on the Lord's Supper
Russell D. Moore, I. John Hesselink, David P. Scaer, and Thomas A. Baima
Bibliographic Information
Contributors: Moore, Russell D.; Hesselink, I. John; Scaer, David P.; Baima, Thomas A. Full Title: Understanding Four Views on the Lord's Supper General Editor: Armstrong, John H. Series Editor: Engle, Paul E. Publisher: Zondervan Academic Year of Publication: 2007 Pages: 224 pp. ISBN: 978-0-310-26268-8 Series: Counterpoints: Church Life
Author Background
Russell D. Moore (Ph.D., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) was at the time of publication Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration at Southern Seminary; he subsequently served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (2013–2021) and later as Editor in Chief of Christianity Today. He writes from within the Baptist/Free Church tradition — his Southern Seminary formation, his commitment to believer's baptism and congregational polity, and his defense of what he calls a "sign" rather than a "sacrament" all reflect that location. His chapter is notable for consciously distancing itself from bare Zwinglian memorialism and developing a richer redemptive-historical and eschatological account of the Supper.
I. John Hesselink (Th.D., University of Basel, under Karl Barth) is the Albertus C. Van Raalte Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan, a Reformed Church in America institution. He served as a missionary in Japan from 1953 to 1973 and is one of the foremost Calvin scholars in the English-speaking world, the author of Calvin's First Catechism: A Commentary and On Being Reformed. His chapter is the volume's most historically anchored contribution — a meticulous exposition of Calvin's doctrine of spiritual real presence — and reflects the Reformed/Calvinist tradition at the high-water mark of its sacramental theology. His institutional location in the Reformed Church in America distinguishes him from the more arid Zwinglian memorialism that characterizes much of popular Reformed and Presbyterian piety.
David P. Scaer (S.T.D., Concordia Seminary) is Chairman of the Department of Systematic Theology at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana — the seminary of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod's more confessionally conservative wing — and serves as editor of Concordia Theological Quarterly. He writes from the Lutheran tradition with complete confessional explicitness, grounding his argument directly in the Augsburg Confession, Luther's Small and Large Catechisms, and the Formula of Concord's treatment of the Lord's Supper. His chapter is the most uncompromising in the volume: he does not seek points of agreement with the other three positions but argues that the Lutheran confession of Christ's body and blood "in, with, and under" the bread and wine is what the biblical text requires and that the alternatives represent various degrees of departure from the institution narrative.
Thomas A. Baima (S.T.D., Pontifical University of St. Thomas, Rome; J.C.D., Loyola University Chicago) is a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, Provost of the University of Saint Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, and a professor of systematic theology. He completed his doctoral work in the same broadly Catholic liberal-arts tradition that has produced some of the most intellectually serious Catholic-Protestant dialogue of the twentieth century. He writes from the Roman Catholic tradition and is the volume's most philosophically sophisticated and most deliberately ecumenical contributor. His chapter grounds the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation not in Aristotelian metaphysics alone but in the theology of union with Christ by grace — a move that allows him to engage the Protestant contributors charitably while maintaining the full Catholic position.
John H. Armstrong, the volume's general editor, holds degrees from Wheaton College, Wheaton Graduate School, and Luther Rice Seminary and was the founder of ACT 3 (A Center for Christian Theology), an organization devoted to Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox dialogue. His introduction and conclusion are the most irenic and ecumenically oriented framing pieces in any Counterpoints volume reviewed by The Open Volume to date — a reflection of his conviction that divisions over the Supper represent Christianity's deepest ecclesial wound.
Thesis and Central Argument
Understanding Four Views on the Lord's Supper belongs to the "Church Life" subseries of the Counterpoints project rather than the "Bible and Theology" subseries that houses most volumes in this catalog. This distinction is significant: where the Bible and Theology volumes debate doctrinal questions primarily through exegetical and systematic-theological argument, the Church Life volumes address questions of ecclesial practice and identity that are simultaneously exegetical, historical, liturgical, and confessional. The Lord's Supper is the most historically productive of these debates — it divided the Reformers from each other as sharply as it divided them from Rome, and the sixteenth-century impasses at Marburg (1529) remain largely unresolved in the twenty-first century. The volume's central question is not merely "What is the right doctrine of the Supper?" but the more ecumenically probing inquiry: "Given that Christians have done terrible things to one another because of this table, what can we understand and agree about, and where must we honestly acknowledge that we remain divided?" Armstrong's framing makes the volume simultaneously one of the most ecclesially urgent and most diplomatically careful in the series.
Chapter-by-Chapter Overview
Introduction — John H. Armstrong
Armstrong's introduction is the most personally reflective and theologically substantive editorial introduction in the Counterpoints Church Life series. He opens with his childhood memory of words carved into the communion table of his evangelical church — "Do This in Remembrance of Me" — and the questions it provoked that he has spent decades attempting to answer. He surveys the biblical nomenclature for the meal (Lord's Supper, Lord's Table, communion, breaking of bread, Eucharist), the Passover roots of Jesus' institution, and the four dimensions he finds in the New Testament's account of the Supper: commemoration, renewal, thanksgiving, and eschatological anticipation. His observation that Paul's "whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes" (1 Corinthians 11:26) contains both a past and a future orientation — commemorating what Christ has done and anticipating his return — establishes the eschatological framework that Moore will develop most fully in his chapter. Armstrong is careful from the outset to name the stakes: the disagreements among the four positions are "important enough to warrant our continued dialogue" while insisting that Christ himself "is present at this Supper" in some sense — a common affirmation from which the divergences become more measurable.
Chapter One — "Christ's Presence as Memorial: Baptist View" (Russell D. Moore)
Moore's chapter is the most exegetically creative in the volume and the most aggressively anti-Zwinglian — a paradox that gives the chapter much of its vitality. His opening move distinguishes the historic Baptist position from the bare memorialist Zwinglianism with which it is commonly identified: the Lord's Supper "serves less as a 'memorial' than as a sign — a sign pointing both backward and forward." The distinction is important because signs, in the biblical sense Moore develops, are more than mere reminders of past events; they are enacted proclamations of covenant realities that carry genuine efficacy for the community that performs them.
His positive argument is developed through an extended redemptive-historical reading of the Supper's Old Testament background. The Passover, the manna in the wilderness, the messianic banquet imagery of the prophets, and Jesus' miraculous feedings all converge, in Moore's reading, on the institution narrative in a way that frames the Supper as an eschatological sign of the kingdom's arrival. The meal is not primarily about the elements but about what the gathered community announces through its eating — namely, that the kingdom of God has invaded the present age through the crucifixion and resurrection of Israel's Messiah, that the enemies of God are being overcome, and that the final messianic banquet is already beginning. This "warfare motif," which Moore develops at some length, gives the Supper a triumphant rather than merely mournful character, and distinguishes his reading sharply from the individualized piety that often characterizes evangelical practice of the ordinance.
The chapter's most significant weakness is the difficulty Moore has in articulating what makes the Supper irreplaceably distinct from the gathered worship of the community as such. When he writes that Christ's presence is "not in the elements or in the heavens above them, but in the body he has called together, the assembly he rules and protects even now as King," Hesselink's response question is pointed: "What is happening in the present? And how is the presence of Christ different in the meal from the service of preaching?" Moore's eschatological framing is exegetically rich but leaves the Supper without a clear account of its particular sacramental efficacy — what it does that a sermon or gathered prayer does not.
Chapter Two — "The Real Presence of Christ: Reformed View" (I. John Hesselink)
Hesselink's chapter is the most historically learned in the volume and — as a fair representation of the Reformed tradition's most sophisticated sacramental theology — arguably its most important single contribution. His argument has three movements: a survey of Calvin's general theology of the sacraments, an exposition of Calvin's specific doctrine of the Lord's Supper, and a treatment of the pastoral and practical implications Calvin drew from his high view of the Eucharist.
On the sacraments in general, Hesselink shows that Calvin's definition — "an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us" — reflects a higher view than most contemporary Reformed and Presbyterian practice acknowledges. For Calvin, the sacraments are not merely pedagogical aids to existing faith but genuine means through which God acts: "pillars of faith" and "mirrors in which we may contemplate the riches of God's grace." The Spirit and faith are indispensable on both the divine and human sides, but neither reduces the sacrament to mere subjective experience; the objective reality in the elements corresponds to what God does in the soul.
On the Lord's Supper specifically, Hesselink's most important task is distinguishing Calvin's doctrine from the Zwinglian position with which it has been conflated, particularly in American Reformed and Presbyterian practice. Calvin explicitly taught that Christ's body and blood are "truly given to us in the Supper" — that "our souls are fed by the substance of his body, so that we are truly made one with him." The difference from Luther is not about whether Christ is really present but about the mode of that presence: while Luther located the presence "in, with, and under" the elements themselves, Calvin located the presence in a mysterious but genuine action of the Spirit who lifts the worshiper to Christ in heaven and descends with Christ's risen life to nourish the faithful soul. Hesselink quotes Calvin's famous confession of epistemic humility: "I rather experience than understand it" — a phrase that captures the distinctive quality of Calvinian sacramental theology, which insists that the mystery of Christ's presence must not be rationalized away by the Zwinglian reduction any more than it should be materially flattened by the Lutheran account.
The practical implications Calvin drew from this high doctrine — above all his insistence on weekly Eucharist, which he never achieved against the Genevan magistracy's resistance — underscore how far contemporary Reformed piety has drifted from its own founder's practice, and Hesselink's chapter functions partly as a gentle rebuke of that drift. His observation that Calvin sought and nearly achieved sacramental reunion with the Lutherans — Luther reportedly welcoming Calvin's Short Treatise on the Lord's Supper (1541) with the comment that if Zwingli and Oecolampadius had spoken so, "there would have been no need for a long dispute" — is a historically important corrective to the assumption that the Marburg impasse was permanent.
Chapter Three — "Finding the Right Word: Lutheran View" (David P. Scaer)
Scaer's chapter is the most confessionally dense and the most linguistically precise in the volume — appropriately, since its title announces that the central Lutheran concern is precisely verbal: what does "This is my body" mean, and why does the word is settle the question that divided Luther from Zwingli? Scaer argues that the words of institution are the constitutive act of the sacrament — Christ's words accomplish what they say, and the minister's recitation of those words in the celebration effects the sacramental presence of Christ's body and blood — and that every theological alternative represents a departure from this plain reading.
His historical framing is clear-eyed about the stakes. The Marburg Colloquy of October 1529, at which Luther and Zwingli could not agree, was not merely an academic dispute; it was a failure that prevented Protestant political unity against the combined forces of emperor and pope and permanently divided the Reformation's eucharistic legacy. Scaer presents this not as tragedy but as principled confessional integrity: Luther refused to sacrifice the biblical text to political convenience, and the Lutheran tradition has maintained that refusal through the Formula of Concord and into the present. His implicit challenge to Moore's Baptist position — that Zwingli's denial of Christ's bodily presence in the sacrament was, for Luther, an act of idolatry no less serious than Roman transubstantiation — sharpens the ecumenical challenge that Moore's irenic approach sometimes softens.
Scaer's most technically interesting argument concerns what Lutherans mean by "real presence" — a phrase he notes is ambiguous and contested even within Protestant discourse. The Lutheran position is not "consubstantiation" (a term Scaer notes was coined by Lutheran critics, not Lutherans themselves, and carries Nestorian implications), but a sacramental union in which Christ is fully present with his body and blood "in, with, and under" the elements without any change in the elements' substance. The bread remains bread; the wine remains wine; but in, with, and under that bread and wine is the true body and blood of the incarnate Christ. The power that effects this presence is not human faith (the sacrament is valid independently of the recipient's faith, though it is received for salvation only by the faithful and for judgment by the faithless) but Christ's own words, which retain their power across all time and space since their first utterance.
His discussion of the Spirit's role in the Supper is the chapter's most theologically suggestive section. Scaer argues that the Father, through the Spirit, elevates the created substances of bread and wine to become the vehicle of Christ's body and blood — and that this Trinitarian account of the Supper's efficacy is actually consistent with the Eastern Orthodox epiklesis tradition (the invocation of the Spirit upon the elements), even if Lutheran liturgy has not historically used that form. This observation opens an ecumenical conversation with the Orthodox and Catholic traditions that Baima picks up productively in his response.
Chapter Four — "Christ's True, Real, and Substantial Presence: Roman Catholic View" (Thomas A. Baima)
Baima's chapter is the volume's most philosophically patient and the most deliberately ecumenical in its framing. He opens with the Catechism of the Catholic Church's description of the Eucharist as "the source and summit of the Christian life" (CCC 1324) and explicitly commits himself not to defending the caricature of Catholic sacramentalism but the actual doctrine — one that begins, as he demonstrates, with the same affirmation of grace that all four contributors share.
His most significant constructive argument grounds the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation not primarily in Aristotelian categories but in the theology of union with Christ. Drawing on the Christological center of Pauline soteriology — "God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ" (2 Corinthians 5:19) — Baima argues that the Eucharist is the moment in which that union is most intensely realized and most concretely expressed. The transformation of the elements is not a philosophical puzzle to be solved with Aristotelian substance metaphysics (though that tradition provides useful vocabulary) but a consequence of the incarnation's logic: if the Word truly became flesh, if the body of Jesus Christ truly died and truly rose, if we are genuinely incorporated into that body by baptism and faith, then the eucharistic gift of that same body and blood is the most coherent expression of what union with Christ entails.
His treatment of the Second Vatican Council's Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) and its account of Christ's multiple presences in the liturgy — in the gathered assembly, in the Word proclaimed, in the person of the minister, and "most especially under the eucharistic elements" (SC 7) — is the most honest engagement with the Catholic tradition's range on this question available in popular Protestant format. His observation that this hierarchy of presences allows Catholics and Protestants to affirm a common reality (Christ is genuinely present in the Word, the assembly, and the minister) while disagreeing about the distinctive mode and intensity of Christ's presence in the elements provides a map for ecumenical conversation that is more useful than the flat confrontation of incompatible doctrines.
His response to the three Protestant chapters is consistently irenic without being evasive. His questioning of Scaer on the relationship between nominalist philosophy and the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation — noting that Luther's Ockhamist training may have generated as many philosophical presuppositions as the Aristotelian categories he rejected — is the most philosophically penetrating observation in the entire volume.
Conclusion — John H. Armstrong
Armstrong's conclusion avoids the Counterpoints tendency toward forced resolution and instead frames two generative questions: What is the meaning and significance of this Supper? And why should we regularly celebrate it? His observation that all four contributors affirm both the priority of grace and the necessity of genuine faith — despite their sharp differences about the relationship between faith, elements, and presence — points toward a more tractable common ground than the doctrinal disputes alone suggest. His inclusion of Bridge and Phypers's three principles for any true Eucharistic celebration (avoiding emphasis that excludes grace, expressing the priority of faith, and expressing the church as the body of Christ) provides a practical framework that any of the four traditions could inhabit, even if they would populate it very differently.
Theological Evaluation and Critique
Exegetical and Hermeneutical Method
The volume's central hermeneutical question — what does touto estin to soma mou ("this is my body") mean? — receives four genuinely incompatible answers, and the responses demonstrate how deeply interpretive methodology is shaped by prior theological commitments. For Scaer, the plain sense of "is" (estin) cannot be read as "signifies" without imposing an alien framework on the institution narrative; the Zwinglian reading requires a theological override of the grammatical natural sense. For Moore, the genre of the institution narrative — as a Passover ritual in which the lamb is the body of the covenant community's redemption in a typological and not merely literal sense — already anticipates a figurative or sacramental reading of Christ's "this is my body." For Hesselink, Calvin's solution — the elements are truly Christ's body and blood for the faithful, but that truth is realized through the Spirit's action rather than through material colocation — represents the most exegetically honest account of both the real-presence texts and the ascension texts (which require that Christ's glorified body remain in heaven until his return). For Baima, the institution narrative must be read in light of the broader Johannine discourse on eating Christ's flesh and drinking his blood (John 6), which he reads as providing the fullest biblical account of eucharistic realism.
None of the four contributors engages seriously with Jewish background literature on the Passover haggadah and its comparable formula "this is the bread of affliction which our fathers ate in Egypt" — a text that would be directly relevant to the debate about whether "is" must mean literal identity, since the Passover formula clearly does not. This gap is the volume's most significant exegetical lacuna and represents a missed opportunity to adjudicate the central hermeneutical dispute by appeal to the institution narrative's own Jewish literary context.
Doctrinal Analysis
From a Reformed perspective, the Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter XXIX, "Of the Lord's Supper") provides the most relevant confessional benchmark. The Confession explicitly rejects "a corporal presence of Christ in, with, or under the bread and wine" (XXIX.2) and insists that Christ is present "spiritually" to the faith of the communicants (XXIX.7). Hesselink's chapter is the best available popular exposition of this position, and his service in placing Calvin's actual doctrine before readers who have inherited a more Zwinglian practice is considerable. The Heidelberg Catechism's Questions 75–82 — which affirm that believers "truly partake of [Christ's] body and blood" while explicitly denying any change in the elements — provide the most precise confessional expression of the position Hesselink defends, and his discussion of the Leuenberg Agreement (1973) between Lutheran and Reformed churches in Europe suggests that the Marburg impasse, while not resolved, is no longer the complete barrier to fellowship it once was.
From a Wesleyan-Arminian perspective, this volume's most glaring structural limitation becomes visible: there is no Wesleyan contributor, and the Wesleyan tradition's distinctive and theologically rich account of the Lord's Supper is entirely absent. This is a significant omission for The Open Volume's primary audience and warrants extended attention here.
John Wesley's Eucharistic theology represents one of Anglicanism's most significant contributions to Christian thought and stands as a distinctive position within Protestant sacramentalism that fits none of the four views presented. Wesley, deeply influenced by the Non-Juror tradition and through them by Eastern Orthodox liturgical theology, held a consistently high view of the Lord's Supper that he enforced in practice — celebrating weekly communion throughout his ministry and publishing The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice (1743), a reprint of Daniel Brevint's 1673 treatise, along with 166 Eucharistic hymns by Charles Wesley (Hymns on the Lord's Supper, 1745). Wesley's position is closer to Calvin's spiritual real presence than to Baptist memorialism, but it arrives at that position through a different theological route: the anamnesis (memorial in the strong biblical sense, in which the past event becomes present reality) combined with the epiklesis (the invocation of the Spirit upon the elements), both drawn from Eastern liturgical tradition and united in a pneumatological account of Christ's presence that is neither Luther's ubiquitous bodily presence nor Zwingli's purely subjective recollection.
The Methodist Articles of Religion (1784) do not resolve the eucharistic question with the precision of the Westminster or Augsburg standards, preserving space for the tradition's characteristic range. But Wesley's own practice and theology are substantially more sacramental than most of his heirs have recognized: he regarded the Lord's Supper as a "converting ordinance" — a means by which the unbeliever might first encounter transforming grace — and described it as one of the "general means of grace" through which both justification and sanctification are regularly received. His account of the Supper as a present encounter with the body and blood of Christ, mediated by the Spirit but genuinely involving the elements as instruments of grace, is not reducible to any of the four positions in this volume and represents a fifth genuinely distinct option that the volume would have been stronger for including.
From a Roman Catholic perspective, Baima's chapter is a genuine contribution to Protestant-Catholic dialogue on the Eucharist. His grounding of transubstantiation in union-with-Christ theology rather than Aristotelian metaphysics alone represents the most ecumenically productive framing of the Catholic position available in popular English-language format. His use of the Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio, 1964) as a framework for engaging Protestant positions charitably while maintaining the Catholic claim — that the fullness of Christ's presence in the Eucharist is found in the transubstantiated elements — models the kind of honest but generous dialogue Armstrong's introduction envisions. Protestant readers will note that his observation about nominalist philosophy's influence on Lutheran consubstantiation is a potentially significant point that Scaer does not adequately rebut.
From a Lutheran perspective, Scaer's chapter is the most confessionally explicit and the most institutionally anchored. His direct citation of the Augsburg Confession (Article X), Luther's Small and Large Catechisms, and the Formula of Concord (Solid Declaration and Epitome, Article VII) ensures that readers understand exactly what confessional Lutheranism claims, rather than a softened ecumenical version of it. His challenge to the Reformed tradition — that Calvin's "spiritual body" was precisely what Luther and the Formula of Concord rejected as a departure from the plain sense of the institution — is not an ecumenical observation but a doctrinal clarification that the volume needs someone to make. His irenic tone is genuine: he is not dismissive of the other positions, but he is clear that closed communion (communing only those who share the Lutheran confession of the Supper's nature) follows from the content of the doctrine rather than from sectarian rigidity.
Engagement with Secondary Literature
The volume's secondary literature engagement reflects its popular-scholarly register and its 2007 publication date. The most significant resources are theological rather than biblical-critical: Calvin's Institutes (IV.14–17), Luther's Small and Large Catechisms, the Formula of Concord (Article VII), the Council of Trent's Decree on the Most Holy Eucharist (1551), and the Second Vatican Council's Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) and Unitatis Redintegratio (1964). B. A. Gerrish's Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin (Fortress, 1993) is the most important secondary source engaged — Hesselink draws on it substantively — and Keith Mathison's Given for You: Reclaiming Calvin's Doctrine of the Lord's Supper (P&R, 2002) is mentioned as evidence that the Calvinian high view has been systematically eroded by nineteenth-century Presbyterians.
The most consequential secondary literature gaps are: Bryan Spinks's Do This in Remembrance of Me: The Eucharist from the Early Church to the Present Day (SCM, 2013) did not exist yet, but Gordon Lathrop's Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Fortress, 1998) was available and would have enriched the liturgical dimension of the discussion. Most significantly for The Open Volume, Wesley's Hymns on the Lord's Supper and John Bowmer's The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in Early Methodism (Westminster, 1951) are entirely absent, leaving the Wesleyan tradition without representation in a volume whose audience includes many pastors and teachers shaped by that tradition.
Strengths
Hesselink's exposition of Calvin. The most durable contribution this volume makes to accessible theological literature is Hesselink's careful, learned account of Calvin's actual doctrine — a doctrine that most modern Reformed and Presbyterian Christians have never encountered in its fullness. His demonstration that Calvin used language about "truly partaking of Christ's flesh and blood" and "a life-giving power from Christ's flesh poured into us through the Spirit" that would have sounded Lutheran to most contemporary evangelical Protestants — and his explanation of why that language is consistent with the ascension's requirement that Christ's body remain glorified in heaven — is genuinely illuminating. His account of Calvin's failed campaign for weekly eucharist in Geneva, and his note that Western Theological Seminary celebrates the sacrament every Friday, provides a concrete alternative to the evangelical quarterly or monthly practice that most evangelical Protestants take for granted.
Scaer's confessional directness. In a volume that is deliberately irenic in tone, Scaer's refusal to soften the Lutheran position for ecumenical acceptability is actually a service to the conversation. His precise distinctions — between consubstantiation (which Lutherans reject as a label) and the sacramental union of Christ's body and blood "in, with, and under" the elements; between the validity of the sacrament (which depends on Christ's word, not the recipient's faith) and its beneficial reception (which requires genuine faith); between the ordained minister's recitation of the words of institution and a magical rite (the power resides in Christ's institution, not the minister's authority) — prevent the kind of false harmonization that ecumenical enthusiasm sometimes substitutes for honest engagement. His observation that both the Reformed and Baptist positions were identified by Luther and his successors as departures from the institution narrative's plain sense — not merely as liturgical variations within acceptable diversity — is the honest statement of the Lutheran claim that an ecumenical volume must include.
Armstrong's introduction and Baima's philosophical framing. Together, Armstrong's introduction and Baima's chapter model the kind of ecumenical engagement that takes disagreement seriously without treating it as a permanent warrant for hostility. Armstrong's willingness to name the Lord's Supper as the site of Christianity's most violent divisions while still commending the meal as a gift to be celebrated with joy — and Baima's grounding of transubstantiation in the grace-constituted union of Christ with his church rather than in philosophical technicality — together suggest that the available ecumenical space on this question may be larger than the Reformation-era impasses imply, even if it is not large enough to eliminate all genuine disagreement.
The appendices. The volume's appendices — primary-source statements on the Lord's Supper from the Didache, Augsburg Confession, Luther's Small Catechism, Calvin's Geneva Catechism, the Westminster Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, Council of Trent, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church — are among the most useful resource materials in any Counterpoints volume. For adult education settings in particular, these texts allow the volume's arguments to be read alongside the confessional standards they represent, preventing the reader from relying entirely on each contributor's self-presentation of their tradition's position.
Weaknesses and Limitations
The absence of the Wesleyan tradition. The volume's most significant structural gap for The Open Volume's intended audience is the absence of any representative from the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition. Armstrong explicitly names his decision to limit the discussion to "the three historically representative Protestant views" (Reformed, Lutheran, and Baptist) along with Catholic — but this framing effectively excludes the tradition that has arguably produced the richest Protestant Eucharistic theology after Calvin's: Wesley's recovery, through the Non-Jurors and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, of a high-pneumatological account of Christ's presence in the Supper. Wesley's conviction that the Lord's Supper is a "converting ordinance," a "means of grace" through which the Spirit works justification and sanctification in those who receive it in faith, his 166 Eucharistic hymns, and his insistence on weekly communion represent a position that is not reducible to any of the four views presented. Methodists, holiness tradition pastors, and evangelicals shaped by the Wesleyan movement will find this volume's mapping of the terrain incomplete in a way that matters for their own practice and teaching.
Moore's articulation of presence. Moore's chapter is the volume's most exegetically creative, but it is also the one most susceptible to the charge that it cannot account for what specifically happens at the Supper that does not happen in gathered worship generally. His displacement of Christ's presence from the elements to "the body he has called together, the assembly he rules and protects" is consistent with his Baptist theology of the church as the body of Christ, but it means that the Supper's specific significance over against any other act of gathered worship remains unclear. Hesselink's question — "What is there uniquely sacramental here?" — is fair and is not fully answered. For pastors who want to preach the centrality of the Supper to their congregations, Moore's framework offers eschatological richness but limited grounds for arguing that the meal itself — rather than any other act of the gathered community — should be practiced more frequently and with more theological seriousness.
Scaer's dismissal of the Reformed position. While Scaer's confessional directness is a strength at the level of honest representation, his equation of the Reformed position with Platonic spiritualism — claiming that when the Reformed say "spiritual" presence they mean "unreal" or "illusory" presence — is contested both by Hesselink's response and by the explicit Calvinian texts Hesselink cites. Calvin's language about the Spirit descending with Christ's flesh as "a rich and inexhaustible fountain that pours into us the life springing forth from the Godhead" is not Platonic in any straightforward sense, and the dismissal of it as such prevents the Lutheran-Reformed exchange from reaching the depth of genuine theological engagement that both traditions deserve. The Formula of Concord's own summary of the Reformed position — that "spiritual" means "nothing more than the spirit of Christ that is present, or the power of the absent body of Christ, or his merit" — represents one reading of the Reformed position, but Hesselink's careful exposition suggests it is not the most charitable or most accurate one.
Engagement with the Broader Scholarly Conversation
Understanding Four Views on the Lord's Supper participates in a conversation whose most important recent contributions include Gerrish's Grace and Gratitude (1993) on Calvin's eucharistic theology, Gordon Spykman's Reformational Theology (1992) on the Reformed sacramental tradition, Robert Jenson's Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Fortress, 1978) for a Lutheran account that engages the ecumenical conversation more broadly than Scaer's chapter does, and Alexander Schmemann's The Eucharist (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1988) for the Eastern Orthodox perspective that Armstrong notes was excluded for reasons of space. The Faith and Order Commission's Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry ("Lima Document," WCC, 1982), which Baima cites in his response to Moore, represents the most significant ecumenical convergence document of the twentieth century on eucharistic theology and is the natural primary reference for a volume of this kind. David Gregg's Anamnesis in the Eucharist (Grove Books, 1976) and Max Thurian's The Eucharistic Memorial (John Knox, 1960) would have enriched the discussion of anamnesis that several contributors invoke without fully developing. For the Wesleyan tradition, John Bowmer's The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in Early Methodism (Westminster, 1951) and Ole Borgen's John Wesley on the Sacraments (Asbury, 1985) are the primary resources.
Conclusion and Recommendation
Understanding Four Views on the Lord's Supper is the most pastorally relevant and ecumenically instructive volume in the Counterpoints Church Life series and one of the more practically useful Counterpoints volumes reviewed in this catalog. Its primary audience — pastors and educated laypersons who need to understand why Christians from different traditions practice the Supper so differently — is well served by Hesselink's exposition of Calvin (which is the best popular-level treatment of that doctrine available), Scaer's confessional clarity about the Lutheran position, and Baima's gracious but honest engagement with transubstantiation from within the Catholic tradition. Moore's Baptist chapter, while exegetically creative, is the volume's least satisfying contribution on the question of what specifically happens at the Supper. The absence of a Wesleyan contributor is the volume's most consequential structural limitation for The Open Volume's primary audience, and readers in the Wesleyan tradition should supplement this volume with Bryan Spinks's Do This in Remembrance of Me (SCM, 2013) and the Wesley corpus on the Supper.
Recommended for: Pastors in multi-denominational contexts navigating the Supper's divisive legacy; adult education leaders wanting a fair mapping of the four primary Protestant and Catholic positions; seminarians in historical theology, liturgical theology, and ecclesiology; Reformed readers seeking a corrective to the Zwinglian drift in their tradition's practice; Baptist and evangelical readers who want to understand why the Reformed and Lutheran traditions resist the memorialist view; Catholic readers wanting to understand how their tradition's position is received across the Protestant spectrum.
Not recommended for: Readers in the Wesleyan tradition seeking the tradition's own account — this volume should be supplemented with Wesley's Hymns on the Lord's Supper and either Bowmer or Borgen; those seeking a technically rigorous New Testament exegesis of the institution narratives — the volume's engagement with biblical scholarship is limited; readers wanting engagement with Eastern Orthodox eucharistic theology, which Armstrong explicitly excluded.
Overall Assessment: ☐ Highly Recommended | ☑ Recommended | ☐ Recommended with Reservations | ☐ Not Recommended
Comments
Post a Comment