[1] The Christian practice of communion has changed dramatically over its history.\u00a0 Most of the change, however, happened in the first four centuries.\u00a0 In brief, the full community meals that led Paul to scold the Corinthians for gluttony, drunkenness and greed gave way, as Christianity became a religion cozy with Empire, to meals where Christians received a morsel of bread and (perhaps) a small taste of wine from a Bishop or the Bishop\u2019s authorized and ordained priestly representative (McGowan). The location of these meals also changed as Empire took over Christian practice.\u00a0 Meals in the homes of Christians were replaced with token rituals in basilicas–modeled after the buildings of imperial bureaucracy (MacCulloch).<\/p>\n
[2] It was against this system of inequality in power–which became entrenched through three Empires–Classical Roman, Byzantine, and Holy Roman, that Martin Luther protested.\u00a0 He did so by asserting (among some other things) the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s claim was that the body and blood of the living God was not a token to be doled out in trickle-down fashion by an imperially-garbed Bishop or his priestly representative.\u00a0 Instead, the real presence of Jesus was in, with, and under readily available sacramental bread and wine, the fruit of the Earth. Through the Holy Spirit, every believer could receive the promise and reality of God\u2019s real presence, and a place at the table to participate fully in the meal.<\/p>\n
[3] The economic implications of this assertion were, as Max Weber first perceived, and Carter Lindberg reminded us, revolutionary (Weber, Lindberg).\u00a0 No hierarchy riddled with inequality could claim to control the living God.\u00a0 Any such hierarchy turned God into an idol and tool of Empire.\u00a0 Christians worshiped a crucified Messiah, the\u00a0victim<\/em>\u00a0of Empire and its inequalities (Horsley).\u00a0 Christians lived by what we might call a\u00a0sacramental economics<\/em>.\u00a0 The real presence of Christ was sheer agape given as grace, mediated through matter, for human salvation and healing. (Nygren)<\/p>\n [4] As is well-known, it may have been a pilgrimage to Rome in 1510 that first triggered Luther\u2019s allergic reaction to Roman hierarchy (Bainton).\u00a0 The Rome that Luther visited was, in fact, riddled with economic inequality (Alfani).\u00a0 At the heart of that injustice was the Vatican.\u00a0 And at the heart of the Vatican was the work of Raphael–whose brilliant fresco,\u00a0La\u00a0Disputa\u00a0Sacramento<\/em>—The Debate over the Sacrament<\/em>, was itself painted between 1509 and 1510.\u00a0 As Raphael\u2019s subversive fresco asserted, debate over what had been codified at the 4th<\/sup>\u00a0Lateran Council in 1215 and would be reaffirmed in 1551 at the Council of Trent as the dogma of transubstantiation–that bread and wine change into Christ\u2019s body and blood–to put it baldly, had been ongoing throughout the history of the church. Raphael included in his amazing fresco the usual cast of an imperial Jesus on a throne in heaven, God the Father above, and the Holy Spirit preceding to the disputants below, including the four \u201cDoctors\u201d of the church, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, and Pope Gregory I.<\/p>\n [5] But Raphael then included two more interesting choices–Dante Alighieri, and Savonarola.\u00a0 It is the latter who is most significant for our\u00a0purposes.Savonarola\u00a0had preceded Luther as a critic of Roman excess, for which he was excommunicated in 1497 and hanged and burned a year later (Weinstein).\u00a0 That Savonarola protested against Rome on behalf of Florentine power, which included of course people\u2019s access to the matter to meet their basic needs, is less important for our purposes than the point that the genius Raphael preserved in his art:\u00a0 it was the debate over the sacrament that was at the heart of Savonarola\u2019s economic and political protests (Guide to Vatican Museums<\/em>).<\/p>\n [6] We shall follow Raphael\u2019s insight in this brief essay.\u00a0 The doctrine of transubstantiation as reinforced at the Council of Trent (the very conciliar process was important) emerged in part as an effort to\u00a0remedy<\/em>\u00a0economic inequality that concentrated vast and ostentatious wealth in the hands of a hierarchical and imperial church.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s teachings (and certainly the practices of Reformers who followed him–such as Zwingli and Zinzendorf) began gradually to level the economic playing field through the practices of capitalism associated with the so-called Protestant ethic. \u00a0Matter mattered in new ways.\u00a0 A sacramental economics now contended with sacramentalism, on the one hand, and spiritualism, on the other–both of which, as Luther saw it, left people vulnerable rather than empowered through their relationship with the church.<\/p>\n [7] That ethic had its shadow sides.\u00a0 It could lead to iconoclastic destruction of matter.\u00a0 And it could lead to war and greed.\u00a0 But Luther\u2019s primary weapons were words (Grafton). It was polemic that triggered the Reformation.\u00a0 From Jan Hus to Savonarola to Luther to the Peasant\u2019s War to Zwingli to Zinzendorf is a winding but clearly marked road with two parallel and intersecting lanes–polemic over the Sacrament, and critique of economic inequality.<\/p>\n [8] In Luther\u2019s works, we can see the connections in his 1517\u00a095 Theses<\/em>, in his 1520\u00a0On the Babylonian Captivity of the Churches<\/em>, and in his 1527 treatise \u201cThat These Words of Christ, \u2018This is My Body,\u2019\u00a0Etc, Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics.\u201d We shall discuss each text in turn.\u00a0 In a brief conclusion I will draw out what I see as the ethical and economic significance and implications of Luther\u2019s polemic down to today.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s sacramental economics has profound implications to challenge the economic inequality that marks U.S. empire.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s teaching on the Eucharist, linked to economics, also sheds light on the problem of climate change denial, which we might read as an iconoclastic last gasp (literally) of the shadow side of the Protestant Ethic.<\/p>\n [9] My basic point will be that our words and practices, including the ways we celebrate Eucharist and the public policies we support and advocate for, have consequences for our broader relationships with matter.\u00a0 If the finite bears the infinite (finitum<\/em>capax\u00a0infiniti<\/em>), then attention to the finite cannot be fleeting or unjust:\u00a0 matter matters (Zwanepol).\u00a0 To state my claim even more strongly:\u00a0 violence against the finite is to build the cross anew.\u00a0 Following Schweitzer, there may be tragic choices we must make where \u201clife-willing-life\u201d cannot simply be left to be (Brabazon).\u00a0 Nonviolence is norm but not absolute (Wink).\u00a0 But the violence of economic inequality of the scope evident in contemporary U.S. society is contrary to the spirit of the Eucharist (Reich).\u00a0 U.S. inequality does real harm to the real presence of Christ.\u00a0 Indeed, global economic inequality, paired with climate change denial, may–if the Earth\u2019s climate changes as rapidly as some scientists now predict, lead to a world with no bread, no wine, no body, no blood (Harvey).<\/p>\n The Critique of Economic Inequality in Luther\u2019s 95 Theses<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n [10] As Dr. Timothy J. Wengert has made clear, in his recent translation and commentary on the 95 Theses, \u201cLuther\u2019s earliest concern [regarding] indulgences was not that heaven and the gospel were for sale but rather that escape from judgment and from the law were.\u201d(Loc 261).\u00a0 \u00a0In general, Wengert makes it clear that the theses should be read as assertions in theological ethics.\u00a0 The matters at stake in the\u00a095 Theses<\/em>, and at stake in the later (1518)\u00a0Sermon on Indulgences and Grace,<\/em>\u00a0which was reprinted more than twenty-five times and made Luther a best-seller overnight, were matters of the realm of both God\u2019s \u201cright\u201d and God\u2019s \u201cleft\u201d hand, both gospel and law.\u00a0 Most analysis has focused on the former–on Luther\u2019s theological insights.<\/p>\n [11] But the ethical implications of the\u00a0Theses<\/em>\u00a0are equally, and perhaps even of greater, consequences–given how quickly the Reformation spread, and how quickly it spread well beyond Luther\u2019s intention or control.\u00a0 And among those ethical matters at stake was matter itself, and how it was distributed and exchanged; what future generations would call the discipline of economics.<\/p>\n [12] It is not difficult to discover the economic implications of the\u00a095 Theses<\/em>, and then to connect them to Luther\u2019s theology of Holy Communion.\u00a0 Leo X had proclaimed a plenary \u201cPeter\u2019s Indulgence\u201d in 1515 to help rebuild the Basilica of St. Peter and Paul in Rome(Wengert, Loc 513).\u00a0 With this as background, Luther\u2019s economic rationale emerges clearly as a defense of the poor.\u00a0 Theses 27 and 28 read, in the official translation of the German government:\u00a027. \u00a0\u201cThey preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory.\u00a0 28.\u00a0 It is certain that when money clinks in the money chest, greed and avarice can be increased; but when the church intercedes, the result is in the hands of God alone.\u201d\u00a0The church was fostering a practice based in greed.<\/p>\n [13] Following this claim, in Theses 36 and 37, Luther took away any transactional character to penance through indulgences, and he asserted that all Christians could receive forgiveness regardless of their ability to buy indulgences for their departed loved ones:<\/p>\n The key word in those theses is \u201cany,\u201d\u00a0Quilibet<\/em>\u00a0in Latin.\u00a0 In effect, as the most basic undergraduate student of the Reformation can reiterate, Luther made the relationship between God and any\u00a0individual<\/em>\u00a0the central locus of the salvific exchange, if we may speak in these terms, rather than a transaction between God and an individual on behalf of another individual soul (or souls) mediated and controlled by the hierarchical church.\u00a0Theses 41-3 then draw out some of the ethical implications of this change:<\/p>\n \u201cGood works of love,\u201d \u201cworks of mercy,\u201d and giving \u201cto the poor\u201d were more important than buying indulgences to support the pope\u2019s building project.<\/p>\n [14] And the problem with indulgences is that they promoted inequality.\u00a0 The rich could pay for lots of them, and the Pope was building St. Peter\u2019s by fleecing the poor.\u00a0 Luther naively (or strategically) imagined that if the Pope actually knew the economics of indulgences, he would end the practice and the inequality it produced.\u00a0 Theses 50 and 51 put this hope clearly:<\/p>\n [15] This noble hope was, alas, ill-founded. For making the Pope aware of how indulgences were working to sanction greed, as if he did not already know, Luther was excommunicated in 1521.\u00a0 It is difficult, in retrospect, to imagine any other result.\u00a0 But in 1517, Luther could imagine that Leo might consider the words of a \u201cshrewd …. lay person,\u201d as Luther put it in Thesis 86, who might ask:\u00a0 \u201c`Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build this one basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?\u2019”\u00a0 It was this basic inequality–the flow of resources from the poor to the Pope, that was at the heart of Luther\u2019s critique of indulgences, in an economic reading. \u00a0Luther tied this critique directly to the Sacrament in his 1520 treatise\u00a0On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,<\/em>\u00a0to which we can now turn.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Communion and Economic Inequality in\u00a0On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church<\/em><\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n [16] There are three key ways that Luther asserted that matter mattered sacramentally in\u00a0On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church<\/em>, and thereby critiqued economic inequality.\u00a0 First, he asserted that the Eucharist was an egalitarian meal–not a priestly prerogative.\u00a0 Secondly, he asserted that the \u201cthing itself,\u201d bread and wine, body and blood, is what mattered in the Eucharist–over and against the Aristotelian metaphysical superstructure that differentiated substance from accidents to explain transubstantiation.\u00a0 Finally, he asserted that the bread and wine were also the \u201creal presence\u201d of Jesus Christ, just as the human body of Jesus was the real presence of the living God through the incarnation.\u00a0 The last point was the crucial one.\u00a0 It was a docetic Christology that justified economic exploitation, and that turned the Mass into a tool of Empire.<\/p>\n [17] Luther asserted that the Eucharist was an egalitarian meal by contending that people should be offered the sacrament in both kinds–both bread and wine, as often as they request it, and in a rite that used vernacular languages.\u00a0 \u201cAll who deny communion in both kinds to the laity are wicked,\u201d Luther put it with typical tact (Three Treatises<\/em>, p. 130).\u00a0 \u201cChrist gave the whole sacrament to all his disciples,\u201d Luther concluded from his reading of Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22.\u00a0 Consequently, the sacrament \u201cought not to be withheld from [the laity] in either form.\u201d (134-5) Behind this assertion of an open table was a question of authority:\u00a0 Whose meal was it?\u00a0 \u201cThe sacrament does not belong to the priests,\u201d Luther asserted, \u201cbut to all [people].\u201d This meant the meal should be readily available.\u00a0 \u201cThe priests are not lords,\u201d Luther went on, overturning the feudal reality, \u201cbut servants in duty bound to administer both kinds to those who desire them, as often as they desire them.\u201d (142)\u00a0 And this ready accessibility of the sacrament, if we may speak in such terms, meant that it should be celebrated in the vernacular.\u00a0 \u201cWould to God that as [a priest] elevates the sign, or sacrament, openly before our eyes, he might also sound in our ears the word, or testament, in a loud, clear voice, and in the language of the people, whatever it may be.\u201d (174)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [18] The church, in short, did not have the authority to withhold what God offered, and the sacrament, and especially the cup, was offered to all:<\/p>\n Do you not see whom [Jesus] addressed when he gives the cup?\u00a0 Does he not give it to all?\u00a0 Does he not say that it is poured out for all?\u00a0 \u201cFor you\u201d [Luke 22:20], he says–let this refer to the priests.\u00a0 \u201cAnd for many\u201d [Matt. 26:28], however, cannot possibly refer to the priests.\u00a0 Yet he says: \u201cDrink of it, all of you\u201d [Matt 26:27].\u201d (137)<\/p>\n The Eucharist was a meal available to all–an egalitarian offering from God for the benefit of all.<\/p>\n [19] Holy Communion was also not just a sign of God\u2019s promise, but the actual thing itself. \u00a0\u201cIn every sacrament the sign as such is incomparably less than the thing itself.\u201d(137-8)\u00a0 In a perverse substitution, instead of offering the thing itself to people, the church was hoarding things.\u00a0 \u201cHaving long ago lost the grace of the sacrament,\u201d Luther put it, \u201cwe contend for the sign, which is the lesser … just as some men for the sake of ceremonies contend against love.\u00a0 This monstrous perversion seems to date from the time when we began to rage against Christian love for the sake of the riches of this world.\u201d (138)<\/p>\n [20] What had grown up around the thing itself were layers of ceremonies, signs of Empire and its insatiable greed: \u201cthe holy sacrament has been turned into mere merchandise, a market, and a profit-making business.\u201d (152)\u00a0 Instead, the church must \u201cput aside whatever has been added to [the sacrament\u2019s] original simple institution by the zeal and devotion of [people]:\u00a0 such things as vestments, ornaments, chants, prayers, organs, candles, and the whole pageantry of outward things.\u201d (153)\u00a0 Christ was not an Emperor; he died at the hands of empire.\u00a0 It is here we can understand anew Luther\u2019s critique of the Mass as sacrifice–which has been the preferred rite of imperial power down to today. The language of sacrifice in connection to Communion made the meal a work; something humans\u00a0had to do<\/em>–rather than the free offering of God to be received by humans through faith and activated in works of love on behalf of one\u2019s neighbor and the world. (171-4; see also Heim)<\/p>\n [21] And it was Luther\u2019s assertion of the real presence of God in the sacrament that at was at the heart of his economic critique of inequality in\u00a0On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church<\/em>.\u00a0 At Holy Communion one receives \u201creal bread and real wine, in which Christ\u2019s real flesh and real blood are present.\u201d (145) Luther here drew on Occam to satirize the doctrine of transubstantiation.\u00a0 \u201cNo violence is to be done to the words of God,\u201d he asserted, rather \u201cthey are to be retained in their simplest meaning as far as possible.\u201d (146)\u00a0 Applying this razor to the doctrine of transubstantiation, Luther asserted that \u201cit is an absurd and unheard-of juggling with words to understand \u2018bread\u2019 to mean \u2018the form or accidents of bread,\u2019 and \u2018wine\u2019 to mean \u2018the form or accidents of wine.\u2019 (147) \u00a0No, the church could be \u201crid of all these … monstrosities … if they simply permitted real bread to be present.\u201d\u00a0 And at the root was Christology:<\/p>\n What is true\u00a0in regard to\u00a0Christ is also true in regard to the sacrament.\u00a0 In order for the divine nature to dwell in him bodily [Col. 2:9], it is not necessary for the human nature to be transubstantiated and the divine nature contained under the accidents of the human nature.\u00a0 Both natures are simply there in their entirety, and it is truly said: \u201cThis man is God; this God is man. (151)<\/p>\n The \u201cmetaphysical trivialities\u201d of transubstantiation eroded the full humanity of Christ in a docetic denial of matter.<\/p>\n [22] Luther thus used a vivid economic metaphor to describe how the Babylonian captivity of the church had led to the people being \u201cdespoiled of all our precious possessions.\u201d (166)\u00a0 And the consequences of waking up to this captivity were revolutionary.\u00a0 \u201cBut you will say,\u201d Luther noted, turning in his concluding remarks to take up objections:<\/p>\n What is this?\u00a0 Will you not overturn the practice and the teaching of all the churches and monasteries, by virtue of which they have flourished all these centuries?\u00a0 For the mass is the foundation of their anniversaries, intercessions, applications, communications, etc., that is to say, of their fat income. I answer:\u00a0 This is the very thing that has constrained me to write of the captivity of the church.\u00a0 For it is in this manner that the sacred testament of God has been forced into the service of a most impious traffic. (169)<\/p>\n [23] Here, both the potential, and the peril, of Luther\u2019s sacramental economics, become clear.\u00a0 The meal was available to all, not just as a sign, but as the thing itself, the real presence of the living God in real bread and real wine.\u00a0 People could take a place at the table, without reservations.\u00a0 And they could\u00a0demand<\/em>\u00a0one.\u00a0 Within a year, on Christmas Day, 1521, Andreas\u00a0BodensteinKarlstadt\u00a0celebrated the Lord\u2019s Supper in Wittenberg in both kinds, dressed in plain clothes, and shortly thereafter published his\u00a0A New Order for the City of Wittenberg<\/em>, calling for the stripping of altars and removal of images from churches (Reformation 500<\/em>). Within three years, the Peasant\u2019s War was raging.\u00a0 Luther now had to contend with a violence more immediate than violence done to the words of God by metaphysical monstrosities.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s reaction against this violence, siding with the princes, is well known.\u00a0 But vast swaths of people had been awakened to the practical economic implications of their religious and spiritual lives.\u00a0 It would take centuries, but the feudal economic system would end along with the end of the Babylonian captivity of the sacrament.\u00a0 Matter mattered in new ways.<\/p>\n Communion and Economic Inequality in \u201cThat These Words of Christ … Still Stand Firm\u201d<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n [24] But back in 1527, Luther was \u201ccaught between two enemies,\u201d as he saw it (Burnett, Loc. 3005).\u00a0 On the one hand was the papacy, transubstantiation, and the violence of grotesque economic inequality–call it sacramentalism.\u00a0 On the other hand, were \u201cthe fanatics,\u201d notably Thomas\u00a0M\u00fcntzer\u00a0and the peasants who interpreted the sacrament symbolically or spiritually, and who took the economic and political implications of the meal to the point of revolutionary violence–call it spiritualism.\u00a0 It was against the latter that Luther penned his \u201cThat These Words of Christ … Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics\u201d in 1527.<\/p>\n [25] To be sure, Luther conflated a wide range of critics under the title \u201cfanatics,\u201d and his arguments against\u00a0Karlstadt,Oecolampadius, Zwingli, and others ranged over a great deal of terrain.\u00a0 It would be a mistake, however, simply to follow the Marxist line and to assume that Luther\u2019s argument was\u00a0merely<\/em>\u00a0a \u201cconservative\u201d turn, or a retreat from the radical implications of his earlier writings (Brady). Rather, Luther\u2019s polemic asserted (again) something like a sacramental economics.<\/p>\n [26] Luther\u2019s paradoxical Christology articulated a doctrine of the \u201cubiquity\u201d of real presence, and he sought a middle way between the spiritual and the material, holding them both together:\u00a0 a sacramental economics. \u00a0Left out of Luther\u2019s critique, of course, were the princes–and it was precisely on this point that the reforming parties disagreed.\u00a0 Luther foresaw a place for \u201ccivil government\u201d analogous to the place of bread and wine in the sacrament.\u00a0 Civil government existed to restrain evil–not as an abstract symbol, but as a mode of God\u2019s presence in the flesh that generated the existence of a harmonious and peaceful society.\u00a0 To separate bread and wine from Christ\u2019s body and blood, the spirit from the flesh, or civil government from the generation of peace, was to imagine a spiritual purity apart from flesh that in fact produced a \u201cdrowning in flesh,\u201d as Thomas\u00a0M\u00fcntzer\u00a0had experienced in his own torturous life and death. (Burnett, Loc 4666).<\/p>\n [27] It is no coincidence that \u201cthe devil\u201d played a much larger role in Luther\u2019s 1527 writing than in his earlier work.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s invective and satire reflected the rhetorical and physical violence that had accompanied the radical turn in the Reformation.\u00a0 Luther found himself reviled as an \u201cidolater\u201d who worshiped \u201cthe baked God, the edible and drinkable God, the bread-God, the wine-God.\u201d(3086)\u00a0 Luther and those like him were \u201ccannibals.\u201d(4513)\u00a0 In turn, Luther called his opponents fanatics, dogs, pigs, asses, and tools of Satan (3735).<\/p>\n [28] Such polemic of course produced real consequences.\u00a0 Polemic hardened party lines and eventually led to the aligning of princes and civil government with theological parties in conflicts that raged until the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, by one accounting, or the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, by another.\u00a0 Yet a third accounting of history might see the current concentration of economic resources among a global transnational empire as yet a final reckoning with this polemical and ideologically perverse under-side of the emerging Protestant ethic.\u00a0 Not the Pope but now secular corporations (note well the bodily metaphor) and their CEO\u2019s replicated the kinds of concentration of wealth once sought and displayed by the Pope, with the leaders of neo-liberal or crony capitalism hiding their gluttony and greed under the guise of a new kind of empire, nationalist sovereignty, and\/or toxic charity, depending upon one\u2019s perspective (Hardt and Negri; Rose; Lupton).<\/p>\n [29] Luther\u2019s own sacramental economics argued for a unity between infinite and finite that saw divine presence both \u201ceverywhere and nowhere,\u201d both \u201cin the tiniest tree leaf\u201d and yet \u201cnot circumscribed\u201d by such location in place.\u00a0 According to Luther, his opponents blasphemed \u201cthe holy and venerable sacrament … out of which they would like to make mere bread and wine as a symbol or memorial sign.\u201d(3026)\u00a0 To separate bread and wine from body and blood, when the words of Scripture said clearly that \u201cthis is my body,\u201d struck Luther as the same kind of dualism in a different form against which he had argued against indulgences and the Pope\u2019s greed.<\/p>\n [30] Now the problem was that Luther\u2019s opponents would \u201cplay dice with the sacred words of Christ,\u201d\u00a0as a way to\u00a0score points in a growing rivalry to control the symbolic assets of crumbling Roman Catholic hegemony (3402).\u00a0 Unlike the Reformers in Basel and Strasbourg, much less in Zwickau, for Luther Christ\u2019s real presence was also a sensual presence:\u00a0 in Communion, he wrote, \u201cthe bread we see with our eyes, but we hear with our ears that Christ\u2019s body is present.\u201d(3194) Luther\u2019s emphasis on sensual presence asserted that words mattered, and matter mattered.\u00a0 He thus developed his critique with a creation-centered analogy.\u00a0 To turn Jesus\u2019 words \u201cthis is my body\u201d into \u201cthis signifies my body\u201d would be like distorting the first words of Genesis.<\/p>\n [31] It is worth hearing both Luther\u2019s satire and his defense of creation implicit in a somewhat lengthy argument:<\/p>\n This certainly is an extraordinary situation! It is just as if I denied that God had created the heavens and the earth, and asserted with Aristotle and Pliny and other heathens that the world existed from eternity, but someone came and held Moses under my nose, Gen. 1[:1], \u201cIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.\u201d I would then try to make the text read: \u201cGod\u201d now should mean the same as \u201ccuckoo,\u201d \u201ccreated\u201d the same as \u201cate,\u201d and \u201cthe heavens and the earth\u201d the same as \u201cthe warbler, feathers and all.\u201d The word of Moses thus would read according to Luther\u2019s text, \u201cIn the beginning the cuckoo ate the warbler, feathers and all,\u201d and could not possibly mean, \u201cIn the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.\u201d What a marvelous art this would be\u2014one with which rascals are quite familiar! … Ah, what a rumpus I would stir up among Jews and Christians, in the New and the Old Testaments, if such brazenness\u00a0were\u00a0allowed me! If you ask, \u201cWhat devil would allow you to do such a thing?\u201d the answer is, \u201cWhat devil other than the one who allows Zwingli andOecolampadius\u00a0to do it? (3227-3241)<\/p>\n Words mattered.\u00a0 Matter mattered.<\/p>\n [32] Not coincidentally, attention to creation and place runs like a red thread throughout Luther\u2019s polemic.\u00a0 Notably, one of the arguments that Luther developed was what came to be called (not entirely accurately) the doctrine of \u201cubiquity.\u201d That is, Christ was sacramentally present everywhere, even as God worked specifically through the bread and wine of the sacrament.\u00a0 Luther\u2019s opponents, as Luther characterized them, argued that because Christ dwelt at the right hand of God, Christ could not be literally present in the bread and wine.\u00a0 This gave Luther plenty of room again to employ satire:<\/p>\n We take up the article that Christ sits at the right hand of God, which the fanatics maintain does not allow that Christ\u2019s body can also be in the Supper. Now if we ask how they interpret God\u2019s \u201cright hand\u201d where Christ sits, I suppose they will dream up for us, as one does for children, an imaginary heaven in which a golden throne stands, and Christ sits beside the Father in a cowl and golden crown, the way artists paint it. For if they did not have such childish, fleshly ideas of the right hand of God, they surely would not allow the idea of Christ\u2019s bodily presence in the Supper to vex them so.(3551)<\/p>\n Luther\u2019s alternative argument was earnest:<\/p>\n Scripture teaches us, however, that the right hand of God is not a specific place in which a body must or may be, such as on a golden throne, but that it is the almighty power of God, which at one and the same time can be nowhere and yet must be everywhere. It cannot be at any one place, I say. For if it were at some specific place, it would have to be there in a perceptible and circumscribed manner, as everything which is at one place must be at that place circumscribed and determinate, so that it cannot meanwhile be at any other place. But the power of God cannot be so circumscribed and determined, for it is immeasurable and cannot be grasped with the senses, beyond and above all that is or may be.(3582)<\/p>\n This was a clever rhetorical subterfuge.\u00a0 God\u2019s power \u201ccannot be grasped with the senses, beyond and above all that is or may be.\u201d\u00a0 Put differently, this meant that God\u2019s power can only be grasped\u00a0with<\/em>\u00a0the senses,\u00a0through<\/em>\u00a0all that is or may be.\u00a0 Putting God in place was risky, but inevitable.\u00a0 As Luther put it elsewhere, Christians must seek a God \u201cclothed with definite signs in place.\u201d\u00a0 The masks of God were inevitably wrapped up with metaphors of place (Pahl, 2003).<\/p>\n [33] Hence, Luther asserted, God\u2019s power \u201cmust be present in its essence at all places, even in the tiniest tree leaf.\u201d(3587)\u00a0 Indeed, \u201cGod must be present in every single creature in its innermost and outermost being, on all sides, through and through, below and above, before and behind, so that nothing can be more truly present and within all creatures than God and God\u2019s power.\u201d(3591) The economic implications of this doctrine of ubiquity are radical, as Luther was aware.<\/p>\n [34] Some would take it to mean that \u201cIf Christ\u2019s body is everywhere, ah, then I shall eat and drink him in all the taverns, from all kinds of bowls, glasses, and jugs! Then there is no difference between my table and the Lord\u2019s table. Oh, how we will gobble him up!\u201d(3735)\u00a0 Against this interpretation Luther took a well-known strong line:\u00a0 \u201cThe civil government ought to punish such blasphemers.\u201d(3740)\u00a0 Theological disorder led to civil disorder.\u00a0 Consequently, Luther went on:<\/p>\n Listen now, you pig, dog, or fanatic, whatever kind of unreasonable ass you are: Even if Christ\u2019s body is everywhere, you do not therefore immediately gobble or swill or grasp him; nor do I talk with you about such things in this manner, either; go back to your pigpen and your filth. I said above that the right hand of God is everywhere, but at the same time nowhere and imperceptible, above and apart from all creatures. There is a difference between God being present and your grasping God, who is free and unbound wherever God is, and does not have to stand there like a rogue set in a pillory or neck irons. (3746)<\/p>\n Let God be God, was how one interpreter put the heart of Luther\u2019s theology (Watson).<\/p>\n [35] God\u2019s presence, like the presence of light, could be experienced by faith but never grasped or possessed:<\/p>\n See, the bright rays of the sun are so near you that they pierce into your eyes or your skin so that you feel it, yet you are unable to grasp them and put them into a box, even if you should grope after it forever. Prevent them from shining in through the window\u2014this you can do, but grope and grasp them you cannot. So too with Christ: although he is everywhere present, he does not permit himself to be so caught and grasped; he can easily shell himself, so that you get the shell but not the kernel. Why? Because it is one thing if God is present, and another if God is present for you. God is there for you when God adds the Word and binds himself, saying, \u201cHere you shall find me.\u201d Now when you have the Word, you can grasp and have God with certainty.\u201d(3751)<\/p>\n It was God\u2019s promise, combined with the bread and wine, that made present God\u2019s body and blood.<\/p>\n [36] The purpose of God\u2019s self-limitation to this mode of presence (like the self-limitation of the cross) was a matter of divine solicitation–an arbitrary (in effect) limitation for the purpose of granting people comfort and freedom from anxiety:<\/p>\n [God] himself points out the bread to you, through his Word, bidding you to eat him. This he does in the Supper, saying, \u201cThis is my body,\u201d as if to say, \u201cAt home you may eat bread also, where I am indeed sufficiently near at hand too; but this is the true … \u2018This is my body\u2019: when you eat this, you eat my body, and nowhere else. Why? Because I wish to attach myself here with my Word, in order that you may not have to buzz about, trying to seek me in all the places where I am. This would be too much for you, and you would also be too puny to grasp me in these places without my Word. (3764)<\/p>\n Again, it would be a mistake to interpret this only as a conservative retreat from radical economic or political positions by Luther. If anything, the best way to understand this argument is pastorally–Luther saw people being hurt by doctrines that separated divine power from economic life.<\/p>\n [37] More accurately, Luther sought to keep flesh and spirit, law and gospel, matter and the divine, God and humanity, in proper unity, relation, or differentiation.\u00a0 God\u2019s different modes of operation all found clarity in the incarnation and its paradox of God become human; spirit in flesh.\u00a0 Docetism again lurked in the background of the spiritualist position, which dredged up \u201call the ancient heresies,\u201d which held \u201cthat Christ did not have natural flesh and blood and was not real man.\u201d(3957)<\/p>\n [38] The paradox of the incarnation, in\u00a0contrast,,\u00a0required that \u201cflesh is and remains flesh whether in the stomach, bread, the cross, heaven, spirit, and wherever you will. The places do not change it: wine, grain, money, cloth remain exactly what they are, even if they change places a thousand times a day. Should not Christ\u2019s flesh also remain the same flesh whether in heaven, spirit, manger, mother, or wherever you will?\u201d (3987) It was crucial to comprehend that \u201cWord and body are not to be separated.\u201d(4739)\u00a0 Even more clearly:\u00a0 \u201cAny spirit that does away with Christ\u2019s flesh is not of God\u201d (4866).\u00a0 To turn the Eucharist into a memorial meal was to turn \u201cChrist\u2019s supper … into a parish fair.\u201d(4762)\u00a0 Words mattered.\u00a0 Matter mattered.\u00a0 And the two were inherently related.<\/p>\n [39] As Luther saw it, then, as the debate over the Eucharist spun into violence the role of civil government became crucial.\u00a0 Theological error produced economic (and political) anarchy.\u00a0 \u201cFrom such a spirit [as that of those who sought to make the Eucharist a memorial meal],\u201d Luther contended:<\/p>\n \u2026it must follow that civil government is of no use, being an outward thing, since people are unwilling to hear or see that it is encompassed in God\u2019s Word and must be believed to be God\u2019s ordinance, Rom. 13[:1\u20135]. This belief [in the real presence] indeed is not of no use before God, and therefore this fanatical spirit must remain seditious and murderous.\u201d (4696)<\/p>\n [40] Whether this was a fair interpretation of the ethical consequences of a theological doctrine will be the task of other historians to sort out, although my own answer is no doubt implicit.\u00a0 But it ought to be clear:\u00a0 it was the\u00a0violence<\/em>\u00a0of the symbolic interpretation of the Lord\u2019s Supper, as it had been the violence of the metaphysical doctrine of transubstantiation, that drew Luther\u2019s invective (violent, no doubt, in its own way).\u00a0 The spiritualists \u201crip God\u2019s Word away from the bread and wine, and let nothing remain but eating and drinking, as in taverns, … [so that] their observance makes gluttony and gourmandizing out of it.\u201d (4758)<\/p>\n [41] Just as Luther was accused of worshiping a \u201cbaked God,\u201d so did he see in the spiritualists the emergence of a world where\u00a0no<\/em>connection would exist between God and bread, God and bodies, God and blood, God and the Earth.\u00a0 The stage was thus set, between what Luther saw as the docetic doctrine of transubstantiation and the docetic doctrine of the spiritualists, for the brutal slaughter of the Thirty Years War, for the rapacious riot and gluttonous greed of early modern empires, and for the ecological degradation of late modern transnational capitalist Empire, increasingly protected under assertions of nationalist sovereignty.\u00a0 If Luther was a \u201cconservative,\u201d then, it was because he sought to preserve a sense of the real presence of Christ \u201ceven in the tiniest leaf.\u201d<\/p>\n [42] Such a promise was made evident, or took root in place, through the location of divine power in the real presence of Jesus\u2019 body and blood in the bread and wine of Eucharist.\u00a0 Even more, then, Luther sought to conserve a ubiquity of real presence so that even a parish fair, one might suppose, could be something other than a matter of \u201cgluttony and gourmandizing.\u201d\u00a0 And this meant, finally, that even civil government, we can imagine with Luther–although few Lutheran theologians and ethicists aside from Kant and Schweitzer have done so, might operate to generate a quite real peaceable kingdom of nonviolence, or perhaps a pragmatic pacifism (Cortright), depending to large degree upon the just sharing of the economic resources of God\u2019s good creation (Barsam, Kant, Pinker).<\/p>\n Implications and Trajectories for Today<\/strong><\/b><\/p>\n [43] It is of course perilous to read anything like contemporary economic systems into the polemics of the 16th<\/sup>\u00a0century; such a reading is invariably a distortion.\u00a0 Yet several obvious economic implications, at least, seem clear from Luther\u2019s arguments about the Eucharist.\u00a0 First, it would seem clear that inequality of the type evident in the 16th<\/sup>\u00a0century Roman Catholic Church, or evident around the globe today, will produce instability, revolt, riot, anarchy–and repression. The authoritarian resurgence in contemporary global politics is a thinly-veiled attempt to protect transnational flows of capital, much as the repression of peasants by princes in the 16th<\/sup>\u00a0century was a thinly-veiled defense of feudalism. On that much, at least, Marx and Engels were right (Brady).\u00a0 Today, neo-liberal authoritarians like Putin, Erdogan,\u00a0Orban, and Trump recognize each other as cronies (Pahl, 2019).\u00a0 National sovereignty–the doctrine that emerged at the Peace of Westphalia, has increasingly become a shield for transnational plutocracy, with \u201cpopulism\u201d organized around various resentments (Cramer, Rose).<\/p>\n [44] So, secondly, what will be the contours of a 21st<\/sup>\u00a0century Peace of Westphalia, if we can imagine such a prospect without the apocalypse of nuclear (or ecological) catastrophe beforehand?\u00a0 Practices and theological ethics that perpetuate the Eucharist as imperial privilege feed directly into iconoclastic reaction.\u00a0 And destruction of bodies (see the sexual abuse crisis) and altars (see Protestant decline) follows just as surely from this twenty-first century conflict as from that of the sixteenth-century.<\/p>\n [45] Perhaps the so-called Nordic model–drawn on undeniable Lutheran foundations, holds promise to link economic growth with a strong safety net and global hospitality (Nelson).\u00a0\u00a0But so-called populist or nationalist movements across Europe surely signal storm clouds on the horizon for social democracy, and the 2009 recession led to austerity measures that re-inscribed the kinds of sacrifices built on the backs of the vulnerable poor against which Luther (and the other Reformers) rightly protested.<\/p>\n [46] Similarly, in the U.S., models of democratic socialism have advocates in some quarters–Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren may still have a chance.\u00a0 But, again, the neo-liberal revanchists seem largely to have crystallized and mobilized the resentments of many rural and small-town voters (Cramer), and Obama\u2019s centrism now appears to have been no more helpful to the working poor than Clinton\u2019s accommodation of neo-liberal \u201cfree trade.\u201d This is especially the case as the one Obama policy to provide real solace to the poor–the Affordable Care Act, struggles to survive a concentrated (obsessive, demonic–pick your description) effort to repeal and replace it.<\/p>\n [47] Finally, then, the future seems bleak for any kind of perpetual peace.\u00a0 And yet, what Luther sought to conserve might be evident in the kinds of economic values inherent in what have come to be called social enterprises–businesses emerging from a regulated and reformed capitalism that serves less the quarterly profits of share-holders and more the long-term sustainability of the planet, people, and profits (Yunus).\u00a0 Such paradoxical businesses–the fruit of a fragile capitalism still very much on the horizon, promises (perhaps) to help people forge the kind of societies where the human capacity to flourish receives the sort of support it deserves.\u00a0 That would include initiatives such as those mandated in classical human rights, including a living wage, education, and healthcare for all. \u00a0\u00a0Such societies would incarnate (so to speak) a vulnerable presence, made \u201creal\u201d precisely by its ubiquity in the fragile and fleeting human beings inhabiting any particular social constellation, gathered around any particular table, we might say.<\/p>\n [48] For Christians, such a society might actually represent or incarnate the \u201creal presence\u201d of Christ for which Luther so ardently argued–not only in the discrete rituals associated with the sacrament of Holy Communion, but even more in a sacramental economy that recognizes Christ in all of the fruits of the Earth, and even (as Luther suggested in his better moments) in even the tiniest leaf.\u00a0 Such reverence for life, following Schweitzer, would turn any meal, any household gathering, any economic exchange, into an occasion for the practices of normative nonviolence, insofar as possible.<\/p>\n [49] Such trusting relations where we pray, \u201cCome, Lord Jesus\u201d in fact would flow from a more general sense that it is precisely Christ\u2019s capacity to serve as host, as the real presence of the power of the living God, that empowers our own practices of radical hospitality, not only around the Eucharistic table, but even more in everyday economic and political relations (Carvalhaes). Surely, such practices must include a sharp critique of economic inequality–although polemic is never enough, and polemic can also be counterproductive.<\/p>\n [50] What is lacking (to my knowledge, at least) is a fully developed positive model of a global (transnational) society built around social enterprises, something like the doctrine of sovereignty that emerged out of the Peace of Westphalia.\u00a0 Such a model would forge a path to societies marked by more just economic relations, flourishing households, and a sustainable planet for future generations (Rasmussen; Moe-Lobeda). Lacking such a positive model, the apocalyptic nightmare looms:\u00a0 global economic inequality, paired with climate change denial, may lead to a world with no bread, no wine, no body, no blood (McFague).<\/p>\n [51] If we can learn nothing else from Luther\u2019s polemics over the real presence, then, it ought to be this:\u00a0 words matter.\u00a0 Matter matters.\u00a0 And this side of heaven, it is up to us to arrange how we relate to one another through words that advance truth, insofar as possible, and it is up to us to forge policies that preserve and distribute fairly matter, insofar as possible.\u00a0 If not a perpetual peace, then, perhaps Lutherans might contribute at least to a pragmatic one (Cortright).\u00a0 And that would be to advance, in fact, what some observers see already happening, quietly and largely unrecognized, underneath and despite the rapacious inequality of the last forty years (Rosling).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n WORKS CITED<\/p>\n Alfani, Guido and Francesco\u00a0Ammannati, \u201cLong\u2010term trends in economic inequality: the case of the Florentine state, c. 1300\u20131800,\u201d in\u00a0The Economic History Review<\/em>, 16 March 2017, at\u00a0https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/ehr.12471<\/a><\/p>\n Bainton, Roland,\u00a0Here I Stand:\u00a0 A Life of Martin Luther<\/em>\u00a0(Nashville:\u00a0 Abingdon Press, 2013).<\/p>\n Barsam, Ara Paul,\u00a0Reverence for Life:\u00a0 Albert Schweitzer\u2019s Great Contribution to Ethical Thought<\/em>\u00a0(London\/NY:\u00a0 Oxford, 2008)<\/p>\n Brabazon, James, ed.,\u00a0Albert Schweitzer:\u00a0 Essential Writings.\u00a0 Modern Spiritual Masters<\/em>\u00a0 (NY: Orbis, 2005).<\/p>\n Brady, Thomas A., Jr., \u201cMarxist Evaluations of Luther\u2019s Thought,\u201d in\u00a0The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology<\/em>.\u00a0 Ed. Robert Kolb, Irene\u00a0Dingel, and\u00a0L’ubom\u00edr\u00a0Batka\u00a0(NY\/London:\u00a0 Oxford, 2014).<\/p>\n Burnett, Amy Nelson, ed., \u201cThat These Words of Christ, \u2018This is My Body,\u2019\u00a0etc, Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics,\u201d in Paul W. Robinson,\u00a0The Annotated Luther: Church and Sacraments.\u00a0The Annotated Luther Series,\u00a0Book 3<\/em>\u00a0(Fortress Press, 2016. Kindle Edition).<\/p>\n Carvalhaes, Claudio,\u00a0Eucharist and Globalization:\u00a0 Redrawing the Borders of Eucharistic Hospitality<\/em>\u00a0(Eugene, OR:\u00a0 Pickwick, 2013).<\/p>\n Cortright, David,\u00a0Peace:\u00a0 A History of Movements and Ideas<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge:\u00a0 Cambridge University Press, 2008).<\/p>\n Cramer, Katherine J.,\u00a0The Politics of Resentment:\u00a0 Rural Consciousness and the Rise of Scott Walker\u00a0<\/em>(Chicago:\u00a0 The University of Chicago Press, 2016).<\/p>\n Grafton, Anthony,\u00a0Worlds Made By Words:\u00a0 Scholarship and Community in the Modern West\u00a0<\/em>(Cambridge:\u00a0 Harvard University Press, 2011).<\/p>\n Guide to Vatican Museums.\u00a0Edizione\u00a0Musei\u00a0Vaticani<\/em>\u00a0(Vatican City:\u00a0\u00a0Giunti\/Sillabe, 2013).<\/p>\n Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri,\u00a0Empire<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge:\u00a0 Harvard, 2000).<\/p>\n Harvey, Chelsea, \u201cOceans are Warming Faster than Predicted:\u00a0 Earth\u2019s Seas are absorbing excess heat 40% faster than previous estimates,\u201d in Scientific American, January 11, 2019, at\u00a0https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/oceans-are-warming-faster-than-predicted\/<\/a><\/p>\n Horsley, Richard, \u201cJesus Movements and the Renewal of Israel,\u201d in\u00a0A People\u2019s History of \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Christianity–Student \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Edition:\u00a0 From the Early Church to the Reformation<\/em>, Vol 1:\u00a0 11-\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 40. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016).<\/p>\n Kant, Immanuel, \u201cPerpetual Peace:\u00a0 A Philosophical Sketch,\u201d [1795] online athttps:\/\/www.mtholyoke.edu\/acad\/intrel\/kant\/kant1.htm<\/a><\/p>\n Lindberg, Carter,\u00a0Beyond Charity:\u00a0 Reformation Initiatives for the Poor\u00a0<\/em>(Minneapolis:\u00a0 Fortress Press, 1993).<\/p>\n —- and Wee, Paul,\u00a0The Forgotten Luther:\u00a0 Reclaiming the Social-Economic Dimension of the Reformation<\/em>\u00a0(Minneapolis:\u00a0 Lutheran University Press, 2016).<\/p>\n Lupton, Robert D.,\u00a0Toxic Charity:\u00a0 How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (and How to Reverse It)<\/em>\u00a0(NY:\u00a0 HarperCollins, 2011).<\/p>\n Luther, Martin,\u00a0The 95 Theses.\u00a0 Official Translation, German Government<\/em>.\u00a0 At\u00a0\u00a0https:\/\/www.luther.de\/en\/95thesen.html<\/a><\/p>\n —–.\u00a0\u00a0Three Treatises, From the American Edition of Luther\u2019s Works<\/em>\u00a0(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1990).<\/p>\n —–.\u00a0 See also Burnett; Wengert<\/p>\n MacCulloch,\u00a0Diarmaid,\u00a0Christianity:\u00a0 The First Three Thousand Years<\/em>. (NY:\u00a0 Penguin, 2009).<\/p>\n McFague, Sallie,\u00a0Models of God:\u00a0 Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age<\/em>\u00a0(Minneapolis:\u00a0 Fortress Press, 1987).<\/p>\n McGowan, Andrew, \u201cFood, Ritual, and Power,\u201d in\u00a0A People\u2019s History of Christianity–Student Edition:\u00a0 From the Early Church to the Reformation<\/em>, Vol 1:\u00a0 153-181. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016).<\/p>\n Moe-Lobeda, Cynthia D.,\u00a0Resisting Structural Evil:\u00a0 Love as Ecological-Economic Vocation.<\/em>\u00a0 (Minneapolis:\u00a0 Fortress Press, 2013).<\/p>\n Nelson, Robert H.,\u00a0Lutheranism and the Nordic Spirit of Social Democracy:\u00a0 A Different Kind of Protestant Ethic<\/em>\u00a0(Denmark:\u00a0 Aarhus University Press, 2017)<\/p>\n Nygren, Anders,\u00a0Agape and Eros<\/em>, tr. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1954).<\/p>\n Pahl, Jon,\u00a0Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces:\u00a0 Putting God in Place<\/em>\u00a0(Grand Rapids:\u00a0 Brazos, 2003).<\/p>\n —–,\u00a0Fethullah\u00a0G\u00fclen:\u00a0 A Life of\u00a0Hizmet.\u00a0 How a Muslim Scholar in Pennsylvania Matters to the World<\/em>\u00a0(NY:\u00a0 Blue Dome Press, 2019).<\/p>\n Pinker, Steven,\u00a0The Better Angels of our Nature:\u00a0 Why Violence has Declined<\/em>\u00a0(NY:\u00a0 Viking, 2011).<\/p>\n Rasmussen, Larry,\u00a0Earth-Honoring Faith:\u00a0 Religious Ethics in a New Key<\/em>\u00a0(London\/NY:\u00a0 Oxford University Press, 2015).<\/p>\n Reformation 500<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cAndreas\u00a0Bodenstein\u00a0von\u00a0Karlstadt,\u201d at\u00a0https:\/\/reformation500.csl.edu\/bio\/andreas-bodenstein-von-karlstadt\/<\/a>)<\/p>\n Reich, Robert,\u00a0Inequality for All<\/em>.\u00a0 A Film by Jacob Kornbluth.\u00a0 At\u00a0http:\/\/inequalityforall.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n Rose, Gideon, \u201cThe New Nationalism,\u201d\u00a0Special Issue: Foreign Affairs<\/em>, March\/April, 2019, athttps:\/\/www.foreignaffairs.com\/articles\/2019-02-12\/new-nationalism<\/a><\/p>\n\n
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