The Colloquy of Marburg
demonstrated how Protestants early in the Reformation struggled to define the function
of the church’s ancient tradition in their debates over the Lord’s Supper.
Considering the church fathers as mostly faithful interpreters, the early
reformers deemed the fathers valuable to biblical interpretation and therefore
considered them as exegetical comrades. Even when the fathers seemed to be
liabilities, they were somehow construed as positive examples, and the early
Protestant reformers usually cited them as allies to bolster their own views
and simultaneously challenge other doctrines. (Esther Chung-Kim, Inventing
Authority: The use of the Church Fathers in Reformation Debates over the
Eucharist [Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2011], 32)
Commenting on the 1539 edition of the Institutes
. . . Calvin does not see the
church fathers as infallible. His willingness to criticize and “correct” the
ancient writers is apparent from an early stage. He writes: “I observe that the
ancient writers also misinterpreted this memorial in a way not consonant with
the Lord’s institution, because their Supper displayed some appearance of repeated
or at least renewed sacrifice. . . Not content with the simple and genuine
institution of Christ, they have turned aside too much to the shadows of the
law” (CO 1:1034). Calvin portrayed their mistakes as tendencies toward
one extreme or another. While Calvin wants to uphold the fathers’ piety, he
judges that they have misunderstood the Eucharist in their descriptions of renewed
sacrifice. Nevertheless, in the same year, in his Reply to Sadoleto (1539),
Calvin argues that the Protestant churches are faithful adherents to the early
church tradition. (Ibid., 38)
Use of the Fathers in the Debate
over the Lord’s Supper
Both collocutors claimed that the
Word of God to be the sole norm—the declared principle of Scripture alone (sola
scriptura). Beza, for example, believed that his use of a trope to
understand how Christ was present in the elements of bread and wine suggested
that the concept belonged to Scripture (not to the originality of the Reformed
theologians), and he further testified to its antiquity by quoting Virgil and Homer.
The emphasis on the principle of sola scriptura did not diminish the use
of the church fathers throughout the sixteenth century; rather, it did just the
opposite. In the search for the “correct” interpretation of Scripture, the
fathers had a pivotal role in intra-Protestant tensions. The Reformation’s
insistence on sola scriptura in no way excluded a reformer’s endeavor to
prove connections to the fathers; in fact, the polemical context encouraged the
recognition of other authorities. The intra-Protestant debates over the
Eucharist provided the impetus for further study of the church fathers.
Although the fathers were initially recalled for support, when the words of an
ancient father challenged a reformer’s view, even the fathers had to be
reinterpreted to fit the shape of Lutheran or Reformed views. There is no doubt
that the ancient fathers played an integral role in the sixteenth-century
debates over the Eucharist. In those cases, however, the fathers failed to gain
any absolute power, and their saying did not cause many reformers to change
their views in light of ancient evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, the
reformer’s new interpretations of the fathers because normative for each respective
confessional tradition, both Lutheran and Reformed.
By 1586 the major confessions had
been ratified. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) had been adopted by
the Swiss and also by the French La Rochelle (1571) in harmony with their own French
Confession of 1559. The Lutheran Formula of Concord was first
published in 1576, with subsequent editions following closely. Each church considered
its confession to be the correct interpretation of the Word of God, drawn from
Scripture. Although these reformers would not admit that any of the confessions
had the unique authority of Scripture itself, they in fact believed that their
confession statements stood as the standard for deciding “orthodox” doctrine.
Furthermore, it became clear that each of these confessions was meant to define
a religious identity based on an interpretation of Scripture that would be
distinct from other interpretations.
At the Colloquy of Montbéliard,
Andreae and his followers presented two groups of theses. The first group of Württemberg
theses listed points on which the Lutherans judged there was no controversy.
The second set considered controversial topics and included Reformed ideas that
the Lutherans considered contrary to Scripture. Bezas’ response did not follow
the order of questions or topics in Andreae’s work, but rather a sequence of arguments
already formulated in his own Confessio fidei and his theses at the
Colloquy of Poissy. These arguments were repeated in his 1593 De
Controversiis in Coena Domini, and thereby established a blueprint for the
Reformed understanding of the Eucharist. (Ibid., 127-28)
