From Renewal, Society for Christian Psychology
V. Ellsworth Lewis, Ph.D.
The Chasm Between Me and My Body
“I would rather drink pure blood with the Pope, than mere wine with the fanatics.”
- Martin Luther, Luther’s Works 37, 317
Envision a Hessian fortress built before Thomas Aquinas took first communion. To the east, see Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, laying siege to Vienna. Hear the Holy Roman Emperor decree Catholicism the imperial religion, and Luther a heretic and enemy of the realm. Note that the term “protestant” is newly coined, following the anti-protestant Edict of Worms. Heresy is a capital offense, and Luther survives thanks to the protection of a Saxon nobleman, Frederick the Wise. Such is the setting when Luther and Zwingli are summoned to Marburg Castle in 1529 — implored by princes to unify Protestants under common articles of faith, in hopes of withstanding the existential threats of that era.
Although Luther and Zwingli sat just meters apart, one might say they were separated by a crevasse. With chalk, Luther wrote “Hoc Est Corpus Meum” (This is My Body) on the refectory table, covering this inscription with red velvet as a priest might veil the chalice. When 15 Articles of Marburg were drafted, 14 found common ground. The 15th stated that “at present we are not agreed as to whether the true body and blood are bodily present in the bread and wine.” The failure was monumental, driving a wedge between Lutheran and Reformed. Luther was viewed as too literal and mystical, Zwingli as overly historical and conceptual. Either way, fifty theologians could not slay Chimera; she remained a fire-breathing enigma.
But what was the true nature of the impasse? Rhetoric aside, it was not chemical: no one believed that wafers become carpaccio. Sola scriptura notwithstanding, the dispute was not ultimately scriptural. Anyone familiar with The Summa Theologiæ knew that both Zwingli’s prooftext (“the flesh profits nothing”) and his argument regarding God’s location (“at the right hand of God”) were lifted from it. Both are drawn from Article 1 of Question 75 (Whether the body of Christ be in this sacrament in very truth, or merely as in a figure or sign?). Likewise, Luther’s chalked response is precisely St. Thomas’ answer – to which Aquinas added, “He is the Truth, He lieth not.” Using Aristotle’s distinction between substantia (essence or being) and accidens (non-essential properties), Aquinas taught that the elements could not be naively equated with flesh and blood. “The presence of Christ’s true body and blood in this sacrament cannot be detected by sense, nor understanding, but by faith alone, which rests upon Divine authority.” Is this written by Luther or by Aquinas? (It is Aquinas.)
The Marburg Colloquy failed, more precisely, because the Eucharist became a proxy for the nature of Divine Presence. How can the Transcendent (Godhead) be present in the imminent (bread & wine). For Luther, the Eucharistic problem derives from the Christological problem and turns on its solution; a paradox in the former allows a paradox in the latter. Both are impenetrable by reason, but acceptable by faith. Zwingli rejected paradoxical (mystical) union, while Luther rejected disembodied (symbolic) union. Zwingli was willing to view the Lord’s supper as a memorial, akin to Passover, a historical event to be evermore “taken to heart.” Luther refused to slacken the super-verbal force of Corpus Meum. He thought it a fool’s errand to insist on resolving a paradox that is both inherent in Christ’s nature (the God-Man) and implicit in His parting words (my body, my blood). Luther was guarding the portal to a starkly real, bodily encounter with God. The “right hand of God” (where Zwingli had geo-located the Logos) is everywhere. Hence, Christ really is where He says He is.
Andreas Osiander, witnessing the debate at Marburg Castle, saw the implications. Christ’s body and blood (whether real or symbolic) pointed to Christ’s promise—the promise of “I in you” (see John 6:56, 14:20, 15:4, 17:23, 26). Osiander must have hoped Luther would more vigorously extend the logic of Corpus Meum to the bodies of the born-again. For, in fact, Luther was tantalizingly close to doing so. First, he had written of the paradox of Incarnation; is it not paradoxical that God should descend from heaven, enter the womb, and become God-With-Us? Second, he had written of the relation of human soul to body: “Behold the soul, which is a single creature, and yet at the same time is present throughout the body, even in the smallest toe, so that when I prick the smallest member of the body with a needle, [I] affect the entire soul, and the whole man quivers.” Third, he queried what happens when Christ enters the heart through faith: “You must answer that you have the true Christ; not that he sits in there, as one sits on a chair, but as he is at the right hand of the Father…your heart truly feels his presence, and through the experience of faith you know for certainty that he is there” (See Luther’s Works, p. 338-340.) If Christ is “bodily present” in the Supper, and bodily present in the heart (where He is felt and experienced), then surely there is no chasm between me and my body!
Or is there? When Osiander fleshed out his view of Christ-in-us in 1550, the idea was buried alive. While Osiander died in 1552, Lutheran and Calvinist counter-argument went on for decades. For Osiander, faith was the very vehicle of union; “faith is the medium of the indwelling of Christ in the human soul.” Once Christ comes to dwell in the heart, God sees only Christ. “Justification, according to Osiander, is the mystical union of man with Christ […]. The believer is so embodied in Christ that in this living concrete unity he is flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone” (Baur, p. 338). Phillipp Melancthon responded: “It must be admitted that God dwells in our hearts, not only in such a manner that He there is efficacious, though not present with His own essence, but that he is both present and efficacious. A personal union, however, does not take place in us, but God is present in us in a separable manner as in a separable domicile” (Corpus Reformatorum, 7, 781). So, God is present … but there is no personal union, and He lives in a separate domicile?
Other minor prophets of the Reformation echoed Osiander’s search for Christ-in-us. While Osiander focused on the non-corporeal (divine) Christ to more easily conceive His Indwelling, Caspar Schwenckfeld postulated a ubiquitous “celestial body” that is the true object of both communion and union. Hans Denck asserted that Logos should not be equated with scripture or doctrine. Not only was Logos “made flesh,” but “without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3, 14). Denck thereby challenged the premise that Christ approaches us only “from the outside” – through preaching and teaching. Christ is always the root of our being, beckoning us also from the depths of our souls. For this, Denck was labeled both mystic and humanist, and was driven from city to city in search of Christian welcome till he died of bubonic plague (Steinmetz, 2001). Ironically, in Nuremberg, Osiander had been the first to ostracize Denck.
Fractures in theology have legacies in psychology. If the body is bankrupt, before and after turning to Christ, then truth is strictly creedal and is measured by correspondence to orthodoxy (right thinking). Epistemologically, truth is whatever corresponds to something external (e.g., historical, scientific, or scriptural “fact”). The true proposition needs to be impressed first on stubborn minds, then on stubborn flesh. We actively mortify ourselves, as the Puritans taught, shunning the idea that our bodies have anything to teach us. If, on the other hand, the body is grounded in Logos (without faith) and becomes flesh of His Flesh (in faith), then Truth is that which gradually “manifest[s] in our body … in our mortal flesh” (II Cor. 4:10-11) as we “present our bodies … holy and acceptable” to God (Romans 12:3). Fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy, Christ removes our heart of stone and gives us his heart of flesh. The measure of Truth, under this new dispensation, is progressive softening, listening, and yielding. “Today, when you hear His voice, do not harden your heart” (Ps 95, Heb 3). Mortification is more like molting—more permissive; the active element is refusal to beat the dead horse. Epistemologically, the condition of our soul is not “true,” but recognizably truer when love, joy, or peace prevail. The cognizable portion of this experience surfaces as insight—the “renewal of our minds” (Rom 12:4). The body keeps a far deeper score, which the mind must follow.
So, is there a chasm between me and my body? Fault lines of Marburg remain active, rumbling beneath Christian psychology. The terra firma of Christian counseling seems rather Zwinglian– an application of rational interpretations of a historical and conceptual Christ which we strive (God help us) to take in. We suffer when we believe lies, and recover when we believe truths. This approach offers an assurance of orthodoxy, a corralling of self-reflection, a seamlessness between catechism and counseling. The alternative is a more liquid, even oceanic sense of embodied life in Christ. C.S. Lewis hints at it in Perelandra—a tale inspired by the notion of floating islands. There, the “unhappy distinction between soul and body that resulted from the fall,” becomes illusory. “Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance.” On Perelandra, the only act forbidden by God is to dwell on Fixed Land.
Baur, F. C. (1847) History of Christian Dogma. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson. (2014). See https://www.biblicalcyclopedia.com/O/osiander-andreas-(1).html
The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ- Against the Fanatics in Luther’s Works, American Edition vol XXXVI. A.R. Wentz and H.T. Lehman, editors, Mulenberg Press: Philadelphia 1959.
Steinmetz, David (2001). Reformers in the Wings: From Geiler to Kaysersberg to Theodore Beza. Oxford University Press.
Strong, J. & McClintock, J. (1880). The Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature. Haper and Brothers: NY. See https://www.biblicalcyclopedia.com/O/osiander-andreas-(1).html
