I summarize his response as follows:

1. This is not his idiosyncratic reading of the Formularies and eucharistic sacrifice; he follows C.W. Dugmore.

2. There are a number of 17th. c. divines who discuss the Holy Communion as sacrifice in a way which seems incompatible with the Elizabethan position as I construe it, which militates against my reading of the Elizabethan view.

3. I misunderstand the Formularies, John Jewel, and Cooper, for all these do in fact allow a more sacrificial account of the Eucharist than I allow.

I want to first note that Mr. Luke seems to be focusing the dispute on the early Church of England, rather than his earlier, more expansive claims about Zanchi, Bucer, and the Reformed tradition broadly. It is perhaps unsporting to read this as a concession on Zanchi et. al., but it is noticeable.

As to point 1, Dugmore’s work on Cranmer has been tried and found wanting by English Reformation scholars. Here is Gordon Jeanes’ precis in his discussion of the history of scholarship on Cranmer’s eucharistic theology in Signs of God’s Promise: “In The Mass and the English Reformers, C.W. Dugmore argued that Cranmer espoused a patristic and early medieval rather than Reformed doctrine of the eucharist, though he has enjoyed little following.” My own reading of Cranmer is heavily indebted to Jeanes along with Diarmaid MacCulloch, Ashley Null, and Bryan Spinks. Of course, it is certainly not impossible that they are all incorrect and Dugmore is right. But his view is…not even a minority view in the scholarship, really, so much as one that has been pretty decisively ruled out. The significance of the Reformed for Cranmer’s eucharistic thought, very much including his appropriation of the fathers, is to my mind rather incontrovertible.

As to point 2, I’m not an expert on the 17th c. The position that there is a significant theological break between the Elizabethans and the late Carolines/Restoration Church of England is currently the dominant one in the scholarship; see for instance Peter Lake’s On Laudianism. Thus the idea that much Laudian or Restoration theology represents “departures from this early Anglican view” — on eucharistic sacrifice or otherwise — is not only the position of (some) Reformed Anglicans but of most historians of early modern English religion. But of course Lake’s work here is not beyond critique, and the consensus may prove to be wrong in important ways. I know scholars whose work I respect very much who think that Lake seriously overstates the case. I for my part simply am not well read enough in the sources to adjudicate the matter. However, I do feel confident saying this: it is a very strange maneuver to offer a set of block-quotes from late seventeenth-century sources as evidence for the views of mid-to-late sixteenth-century theologians. Mr. Luke might be entirely correct about the sacrificial views of these later divines he lists (although I confess that his habit of decontextualized block-quoting does make me worry and his misreadings of many of these early modern sources makes me concerned). But it is nothing to his point.

Let’s turn now to point 3, which is the substance of Mr. Luke’s response to me. Unfortunately, I have some trouble making sense of it; there is a good deal of conceptual confusion. Let me try again to distinguish the main arguments.

1. He articulates again the position that what is at stake in the early English Protestant condemnation of the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass is “the system in which the Mass could be applied unto the remission of temporal punishment by the satisfactory value of the work worked.”

2. He argues that in Jewel we find a willingness to use the language of the church presenting Christ’s sacrifice to the Father combined with a refusal to grant that the Supper accomplishes satisfaction for sins, which he argues is also the position of those 17th c. divines he cites in point 2. He cites Cooper too.

3. He argues that the language in the prayer book post-communion that involves self-oblation can only be interpreted in reference to precisely the sort of impetrationary sacrifice he argues that the Lord’s Supper is, and has always been understood to be.

To point 3.1, Mr. Luke has still not answered my basic objections: his argument that the condemnation of the sacrifice of the mass is fundamentally about the application of the Lord’s Supper to temporal punishment is (a) contradicted by the text of Article XXXI and (b) nowhere stated explicitly in any 16th. c. text of which I know.

Let me further discuss each of these.

For 3.1.a, consider the second sentence of Article XXXI: “Wherefore the sacrifices of masses, in the which it was commonly said that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits.” As best I can make it out, Mr. Luke’s position is that the Article here condemns only the idea that the priest offers Christ for the remission of pain. This, to put it mildly, is implausible in the extreme; there is no textual reason to locate the objection only in the offering of Christ for the remission of pain. A much more natural reading of this sentence, in and of itself and in the broader context of the rest of the Article and 16th c. Protestant theology as a whole, is that the propitiatory offering of Christ by priests for remission of sins or of punishment is rejected wholesale.

As far as 3.1.b goes, again I say: show me where this position about what is wrong with eucharistic sacrifice — that what is wrong with it is solely the remission of pain/punishment by the work worked — is clearly and unambiguously stated in a 16th c. Reformation text!

Let me, however, offer a counter-example. The very first commentary on the Articles of Religion is Thomas Rogers’ The English Creed, published in two parts. Obviously it would be dangerous to assume that Rogers’ interpretation of the Articles were universally held, but I note that he turned from Puritanism to a rather vigorous anti-Puritanism, so if anyone were to be sympathetic to Mr. Luke’s position, one might expect him to be. However, he is not. In his analysis of Article 31, he holds that the Article condemns the positions that “the Masse is a Sacrifice, and that propitiatorie” and that “The Priest offereth up Christ.”

Thus, on point 3.1, I have the plain text of the Article as well as the earliest published commentary on the Articles on my side. Mr. Luke has neither the text of the Article itself nor any clear period expression of his account of what is wrong with eucharistic sacrifice. Certainly he is correct that Anglican divines condemn the idea that the mass can be applied to others for forgiveness or for satisfaction by the work worked. But he cannot show any Elizabethan source at all, never mind a significant one, that clearly states that this is the sum total of the English Protestant problem with the Roman account of the sacrifice of the mass.

Now, let’s move on to point 3.2, the question of the right interpretation of Jewel, and for that matter of Thomas Cooper. In response to my citation of Jewel’s Replie to Harding’s Answeare, he doesn’t really address the text I gave but instead points to a moment in which Jewel cites Chrysostom positively when Chrysostom makes a comment about eucharistic sacrifice. But here, once again, Mr. Luke fails to consider the context. What seems to be at issue — it’s hard to say for sure, given the lack of context provided — is the nature of Christ’s eucharistic presence. Jewel’s point here isn’t to endorse or attack Chrysostom’s account of sacrifice. He is arguing that Chrysostom’s language does not require a corporal or fleshly presence. To make this the centerpiece of an argument for Jewel’s positive account of eucharistic sacrifice is poor argumentation.

As for the other quotations, of course Jewel and Cooper condemn the position that the mass by the work worked forgives sins or provides satisfaction. This isn’t in contention. What Mr. Luke argues — or rather asserts — is that this is the ground of their critique of the late medieval doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. There is no good reason to believe that this is true, and much good reason to reject it; Jewel explicitly gives other reasons for opposing the doctrine.

Simply put, “Protestants, when condemning the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass, often attack the idea that the mass can forgive sins or eliminate satisfaction by the work worked” is just not convertible to the claim “the Protestant condemnation of the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass is on the grounds that the mass is held to forgive sins or eliminate satisfaction by the work worked.”

Finally, point 3.3. Mr. Luke concludes with a turn to Cranmer’s post-communion prayer. And once again, the prayer simply does not say what he tells us it does. He is surely right that in this prayer we call the Lord’s Supper in some respect a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving and ask that the Father grant us forgiveness of sins and all other benefits of Christ’s passion by the merits and death of his Son. But his conclusions on the basis of these facts do not make sense to me. Perhaps I am missing something obvious, but I simply cannot follow his logic.

As far as I can tell, though, one of the significant steps in his argument is that Anglicans “agree that the sacrificial action is completed in the faithful reception of the elements (and this contra Rome) in the new covenant.” But this is of course not true, and in fact begs the question. Is the reception of the elements sacrificial, and in what sense? This is (at least part of) what we are disputing!

Now, the classic Protestant answer is that such reception is primarily not sacrificial; we are being fed rather than offering. See my discussion of Zanchi, Calvin, and Luther in my first response. Any secondary sense of reception as sacrificial that is granted is connected to praise and thanksgiving (rather than propitiation) or the public confession of Christ before men (rather than any offering of Christ to the Father). That is, on the classical Protestant account, in what way that reception might be characterized as sacrificial, it does not pertain to partaking of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. But again, mostly Protestants simply want to argue that the reception of the consecrated elements isn’t primarily sacrificial. Mr. Luke hasn’t demonstrated that Cranmer or Anglican divines depart from this view. He just asserts a rather curious position as given.

And so, when Mr. Luke concludes that the postcommunion prayer “is the culmination of the sacrificial meal in which we impetrate God for forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice,” he simply has not made his case.

So, to conclude, Mr. Luke’s case looks to a largely refuted scholar as an authority, brings in a number of 17th c. quotations which are irrelevant to the question at hand, and cannot prove that any sixteenth century English Protestant critiqued the late medieval doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice solely for the reasons he claims. The question of the development of accounts of Eucharistic sacrifice within the Anglican tradition is an interesting one. But it has to be answered responsibly, and Mr. Luke has not done so.

With this, I sign off and wish Mr. Luke and any readers a joyous Lord’s Day tomorrow. As I said above, I will not be able to respond further, and am glad to give Mr. Luke the last word if he so desires.

I think that Mr. Luke is wrong here, and seriously so. But before I begin criticizing him, I do want to make two things clear. First of all, I think it is a good thing that Anglicans of a variety of churchmanships are engaging seriously with the Anglican Formularies and the Elizabethan Church of England. It is not healthy for our tradition if these texts are seen only as the property of Reformed Anglicans, and I applaud Mr. Luke for attempting to articulate an Anglo-Catholicism that is in conversation with this moment of Anglican history. Secondly, I think it is a good thing when people read and interpret early modern theological texts who aren’t professional early modernists by training, and I don’t want to suggest that these texts are the property of the academy only. This is intended as a friendly — if insistent — critique, and I hope it is received as such.

1. Misconstruing Zanchi

In the more recent of the articles, Mr. Luke argues for the presence of a strong doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice in Reformed Protestantism largely by providing a catena of quotations of indubitably Reformed Protestants using the language of sacrifice in relation to the Lord’s Supper: Zanchi, Bucer, Hooper, and Ridley, along with the more Arminian-leaning Francis White and Jeremy Taylor.

The problem is that collecting interesting primary source passages is just the beginning; these passages then have to be read carefully, situated in their rhetorical context, compared to these thinkers’ broader treatment of the question at hand — only when that is done can one really draw meaningful conclusions. If we look at the first of the quotations in this piece, the reference to Zanchi’s Ephesians commentary, we will see that Mr. Luke’s failure to do exactly this this leads him to pretty seriously misunderstand Zanchi’s position.

Let me place Mr. Luke’s quotation in context. He is correct that the question of sacrifice is the first of the theological topics drawn from Ephesians 5 by Zanchi (pg. 417 of the Google Books scan I linked to above, if you want to follow along). This is small surprise, given Ephesians 5:1’s reference to Christ giving himself for us as “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”

Zanchi divides his treatment of sacrifice here into six headings: who offers sacrifice (Christ alone), what is offered in sacrifice (Christ), to whom the sacrifice is offered (God), for whom sacrifice is offered (us), what sort of sacrifice it is (propitiatory, fulfilling Old Testament sacrifices), and what the power of this sacrifice is (expiating sins, pleasing God, opening the way into heaven, etc.).

It’s his first heading, that Christ alone offers sacrifice, that I’ll focus on, as it’s from this section that Mr. Luke’s quotation is drawn. Now, the title alone might seem already to be a problem for the idea that Zanchi holds a strong doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. And indeed this turns out to be the case. In the very beginning of the section about who offers sacrifice, he rehearses a familiar distinction between sacrifice and sacrament, one made with particular force (as we will see) by Luther. According to Zanchi, sacrifices are what we offer to God; sacraments are what we receive from God. There is a basic and mutually exclusive logic of directionality at play. Sacrifices are directed Godward; sacraments are directed usward. When he discusses sacrifices, he then makes another familiar Protestant distinction: there are propitiatory sacrifices (properly, Christ’s one perfect sacrifice, but figured by certain Old Testament sacrifices), and sacrifices of thanksgiving (praising God, living a life of good works, etc. — these still exist today).

A discussion of Christ’s propitiatory death follows, which leads to a treatment of the Lord’s Supper. In it, Zanchi denies that the body of Christ is offered in the mass for the remission of sins, for the Supper is instituted not as something we offer but as something we eat (thus again the sacrament/sacrifice dichotomy), and argues that in the Supper Christ did not offer himself as a propitiatory sacrifice to the Father, but only on the cross.

Then Zanchi raises a potential objection to his position: what about all the patristic language about the Supper as a sacrifice? Here we’re approaching the passage quoted by Mr. Luke. Zanchi’s basic response is that the fathers understood something very different by this language than his Roman Catholic opponents do. Zanchi argues that this is what the fathers understood by the language of sacrifice or unbloody sacrifice:

They referred the language of sacrifice not only to the offering of the bread or the manducation of Christ’s body, but to the entire action of the Supper. They did this because in the action of the Supper, the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving is offered, because ancient liturgies involved a collection for the poor, because in the action of the Supper, the faithful consecrate themselves to God, because the Supper is a representation of Christ’s sacrifice, and because (here Mr. Luke’s quote begins) in the Supper the faithful are made participants of Christ’s sacrifice. Then the various rather selective quoting from patristic and medieval sources that Mr. Luke mentions follows.

So what can we say about all this, and why does contextualizing this Zanchi passage matter? Well, we see that in the passage Mr. Luke quotes, Zanchi isn’t actually really offering his own positive account of the Supper at all so much as attempting to justify the sacrificial language used by the fathers. By this point, he’s already made a strong distinction between sacrament and sacrifice that would require him to heavily qualify any account of eucharistic sacrifice. And indeed he does: he argues that sacrificial language when referred to the Supper refers to the Supper as a representation of Christ’s sacrifice or the means by which we participate in it and its benefits,1 as an offering of praise and thanksgiving, or to the collection made for the poor in old liturgies! This minimization of and general lack of interest in questions of Eucharistic sacrifice carries across Zanchi’s work; it is found, for instance, in his comprehensive statement of faith De Religione Christiana Fides, in which he doesn’t bother talking about the Supper as a sacrifice at all. Needless to say, “the fathers allowed the term sacrifice to be applied to the Supper in some limited ways” doesn’t seem to get you to the account of Eucharistic sacrifice that Mr. Luke or indeed Dr. Barrett seem to want. To say that Zanchi “affirm[s] a Eucharistic sacrifice that was more than just a sheer act of thanksgiving” is a distortion of his thought. There really is no substitute for digging in at length to the sources.

2. Misunderstanding the Protestant and Early Anglican Critique of the Sacrifice of the Mass

So much for Zanchi, and for the first piece of Mr. Luke’s in general. I want to turn now to his March 7, 2025 article, “The Impetrative Sacrifice of the Mass,” as it is a longer and more serious engagement with the eucharistic thought of Anglican reformers. It is longer and more serious, but I think it still fatally flawed. Here, the issue isn’t the sort of quote-mining that bedeviled the first piece so much some rather strange surmises without any strong textual basis. In this piece, Mr. Luke seeks to make two moves: first, to reconstruct and specify the early Anglican critique of the mass as propitiatory sacrifice; second, to use early Anglican divines to articulate an ‘impetrative’ account of Eucharistic sacrifice. It’s the first part I want to focus on.

Unfortunately, Mr. Luke’s attempt to more closely specify the early Anglican critique of the mass as propitiatory sacrifice — surely a worthily endeavor — is very strange. Mr. Luke seems to think that the fundamental problem early Anglicans, and early Protestants broadly, had with the late medieval understanding of the mass as propitiatory sacrifice is that they objected to its view that the mass provides the “remission of temporal debt due to sin” — i.e. the punishment for even forgiven sins that had to be made as part of satisfaction in late medieval (and Tridentine) accounts of penance.

Here is Mr. Luke:

To my mind, this explanation fares better than attempts to explain the denial of a propitiatory sacrifice in the objection to a “re-sacrificing” of Christ, as it were. The main objections one finds in the divines cited above seem to coalesce around particular practices that don’t intrinsically entail an objection to a re-sacrificing of Christ as such (e.g. the connection between private masses and satisfactions one finds in Cooper). Rather, I argue, the early Anglicans rejected the notion of a mass as a propitiatory sacrifice in the context of what that meant in the polemics of the time: namely, that the mass propitiates God such that God relents of punishments he would have otherwise inflicted owing to temporal debt. For the Anglicans, the mass is not a propitiatory sacrifice in this particular sense.

The problem with this construal is that I know of no sixteenth century Protestant author, English or otherwise, who makes this specific critique of the mass. Not a one. They don’t say this. Unfortunately for Mr. Luke, sixteenth century Protestant divines are generally very happy to tell us why they reject what they believe to be the Roman Catholic view of the mass as sacrifice, and usually (although, as we will see, not always) for one of two reasons: (1) the Roman Catholic view gets the directionality of the Supper wrong or (2) the Roman Catholic view takes away from the finality of Christ’s one sacrifice once offered, and in so doing, from Christ’s honor.

The first position is very clearly stated in Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. Given that Mr. Luke cites this Luther text, it is rather confusing that he doesn’t seem to recognize this. In this text, Luther argues that the greatest captivity of the mass is turning it into a sacrifice, because the mass is properly a promise from God to us, not an offering from us to God. As Luther puts it:

Therefore these two things - mass and prayer, sacrament and work, testament and sacrifice - must not be confused; for the one comes from God to us through the ministration of the priest and demands our faith, the other proceeds from our faith to God through the priest and demands his hearing. The former descends, the latter ascends.

That is, on Luther’s account, the basic issue with the mass as sacrifice is that it takes a gift God gives us and makes it something we give God. Mr. Luke seems to think that the Lutheran view that the Eucharist gives the true body and blood of Christ and conveys the remission of sins suggests a sacrificial view of the mass, but for Luther the opposite is true. It is precisely because the Eucharist gives us Christ’s true body and blood that it cannot be a sacrifice, Luther thinks, except in the most limited of senses.

One of the first articulations of the other objection is found in Zwingli’s Sixty-Seven Articles, where Zwingli makes the basic claim that the papal account of eucharistic sacrifice requires the position that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was not all-sufficient; if something must be offered to God to propitiate him after Christ’s death on the cross, Christ’s cross is thereby dishonored.

Both of these critiques then find their way into later Protestant thinking. For a mature articulation of both, see Calvin’s 1559 Institutes IV.xviii:

Another power of the Mass was set forth: that it suppresses and buries the cross and Passion of Christ. This is indeed very certain: that the cross of Christ is overthrown as soon as the altar is set up; for if he offered himself as a sacrifice on the cross in order to sanctify us forever, and to acquire eternal redemption for us, no doubt the force and effectiveness of this sacrifice continue without end…When God’s Sacred word not only affirms but cries out and contends that this sacrifice was performed only once and all its force remains forever, do not those who require another sacrifice accuse it of imperfection and weakness? (IV.xviii.3)

Indeed, the Supper itself is a gift of God, which ought to have been received with thanksgiving. The sacrifice of the Mass is represented as paying a price to God, which he should receive by way of satisfaction. There is as much difference between this sacrifice and the sacrament of the Supper as there is between giving and receiving. (IV.xviii.7)

This is quite clear, at least to me, and it certainly can’t be reduced to the notion that Protestant object to the idea that the mass remits the temporal punishment due to sins. Surely if they thought this, they would have said so! While it is certainly true that Protestant authors do not reject the language of sacrifice for the Lord’s Supper entirely, they (as we’ve already seen in Zanchi) connect it with the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving which is always carefully distinguished from Christ’s one propitiatory sacrifice. Thus Calvin in IV.xiv.1 again distinguishes between the primary function of the sacrament (attesting God’s grace to us) and a secondary one (our testifying our piety towards God; it’s in this secondary sense that in a limited way one might speak of the Supper as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for Calvin).

What, then, of English Protestant thinkers specifically? Let’s start with the Formularies. Mr. Luke cites Article XXXI, but he misses the rather obvious interpretation of it. The very title — “Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross” — suggests that this Article is very much in the line of critique inaugurated by Zwingli in the Sixty-Seven Articles, that the Roman view of the mass as sacrifice takes away from the total efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice. The text of the Article further confirms this view. Note, in particular, that in a moment in which it could explicitly state the position Mr. Luke asserts early Anglicans held, it doesn’t. The Article condemns the position that the “Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt. If Mr. Luke’s claim were correct, the Article would have to condemn the position that the priest offered Christ for the remission of pain (ie, temporal punishment) only. But it doesn’t — it also attacks the idea that the priest offers Christ for the remission of guilt. Mr. Luke’s claim cannot be right; what is at issue cannot be only the idea that the mass as sacrifice eliminates the pain/punishment due to sin.

The text of the communion service, and in particular its changes between 1549 and 1552, further support the notion that the critique of the mass as sacrifice was far more far-reaching than Mr. Luke allows. What the 1662 will call the Prayer of Consecration clearly distinguishes between Christ’s “one oblation of himself once offered” on the cross and the “perpetual memory” of it that occurs in the Supper. This careful distinction between Christ’s one complete sacrifice and its commemoration is, of course, a reflection of the Zwinglian critique of the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass discussed above.

Also significantly, Cranmer moves the prayer of self-oblation from its place in the eucharistic prayer in 1549 to after reception in the 1552. In the prayerbook liturgy from 1552 onwards, our self-offering is not connected to our prayer over the gifts but rather is a response to our reception of Christ’s body and blood. Here we have a clear example of what J.I. Packer called the cycles of guilt, grace, and gratitude in the prayer book liturgy: having received the gift of grace, namely, Christ’s body and blood, we respond by offering “ourselves, our souls and bodies” in response to what Christ has done for us. The language of sacrifice in the post-communion prayer is very specifically that of a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving — which, as we saw in Zanchi, was regularly distinguished by Protestant authors from propitiatory sacrifices. Further, contra Mr. Luke, it isn’t entirely clear that this sacrifice in question is the Supper as a whole or our self-oblation in response to the Supper; either construal is quite possible grammatically.

So, the Formularies quite clearly rehearse the common Protestant objection that the repetition of masses-as-sacrifices takes away from the finality of Christ’s sacrifice, distinguish between Christ’s sacrifice and its commemoration, and situate the relationship between Christ’s offering and ours in a way that mirrors the distinction in Luther between sacrament and sacrifice. This certainly sounds like a traditional Protestant critique of the mass as sacrifice, not an objection specifically to the idea that the mass takes away the punishment due to sin.

Beyond the formularies, the question of the mass as sacrifice was also a central one to disputes between English Protestant and Roman Catholic writers in the Elizabethan era, as this position was one of the ones Bishop Jewel listed in his Challenge Sermons as dangerous Roman innovations. Harding defends the antiquity of eucharistic sacrifice in the 17th Article of his Answeare to Jewel, and Jewel retorts in his Replie unto M. Hardinges Answeare. Much of this answer is a wrangling over patristic sources which is frankly rather tedious. But Jewel sets out his basic position as follows:

Touchinge the Oblation of Christes Bodie, wee beleeue, + Confesse as muche, as the holy Ghost hath opened in the Scriptures. Where as M. Hardinge saith, Christes Bodie is offered vp by the Priest vnto God the Father, in Remembrance of that Bodie, that Christe him selfe offered vpon the Crosse, He seemeth not to consider the inconstancie, and folie of his owne tale. For it is wel knowen to al Creatures…that Christe was Crucified vpon the Crosse: But that Christe should be Sacrificed by a Mortal man, Inuisibly, and, as they saie, vnder the Formes of Breade, and Wine, and that Really, and in deede, it is a thinge so far passinge the common sense of Christian knoweldge, that the best learned, and wisest of the Ancient learned Christian Fathers coulde neuer know it.

Here the principal argument is that is incorrect — even “a manifest, and wicked blasphemie” — to say that “any mortal man hath Power, and Authoritie, Really, and indeede to Sacrifice the Sonne of God.” This is actually a bit different than the two main arguments I’ve traced out (about the directionality of sacraments and the unrepeatability of Christ’s sacrifice), although I think it relates to the concern for Christ’s honor in maintaining the perfection of his one sacrifice. At any rate, Jewel argues that while the fathers sometimes call the Communion a sacrifice, they do so “for that therein wee offer vp vnto God, Thankes, and Praises for that greate Sacrifice once made vpon the Crosse.” Once again, the distinction is between a propitiatory sacrifice and a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, it is denied that Christ’s sacrifice is offered to the Father, and the sacrificial language is not foregrounded so much as admitted to be admissible in the fathers.

This is not just a concern about the teaching of sacrifice of the mass as remitting temporal punishment due to sin. In fact, it’s quite telling that even the quotes from Jewel that Mr. Luke picks aren’t so narrowly focused either either. The concern just isn’t only about the remission of guilt, and I think Mr. Luke misses that Jewel’s objections to the mass as sacrifice and his objection to the ex opere operato principle, while related, are not identical.

To move to the end of this section, Mr. Luke is surely correct to say that the Anglican Reformers believed that “the mass commemorates, in a realistic way, the Passion, such that the self-offering of Christ is sacramentally present in the bread and wine.” But this does not require a doctrine of the Eucharist as an offering of Christ’s passion to the Father. Indeed, for mainstream Protestant thought, it actually militates against it: for Christ’s real presence is given by God to us, not to God by us.

I’ve already made this point, but I want to highlight it again, because it seems to me that this misunderstanding gets at the heart of some of Mr. Luke’s errors here: he seems to think that an account of the Eucharist as involving the real giving of Christ and the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to the faithful communicant requires or at least is open to a relatively strong doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. But this just isn’t how sixteenth century Protestants tend to think about these matters! This is where the sacrament/sacrifice distinction which Mr. Luke wholly omits is significant: for mainstream Protestantism, the real giving of Christ and his benefits is the part of the Lord’s Supper that can least be a sacrifice, because this is something God does for us rather than something we do for God! I don’t think you can understand Protestant sacramentology, or, frankly, Protestant soteriology, without understanding this key stress on divine agency in making one a partaker of Christ.

I don’t have the time or really the expertise to get into Mr. Luke’s discussion of the “impetrative sacrifice” as articulated in certain divines of the 17th and 18th c. What I hope I have shown is that, whatever one makes of this positive account, his articulation of grounds for the rejection of eucharistic sacrifice in the sixteenth century is just not grounded in the texts at all — and in fact the texts quite clearly say something very different.

3. So What?

Thus far, I’ve argued that in his attempt to defend the Reformation bona fides of a strong doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice, Mr. Luke has used some Zanchi quotes out of context in a way and has misconstrued the Protestant and specifically early Anglican objections to the Roman Catholic doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice. More fundamentally, I think that John Fonville is correct that the basic eucharistic grammar of Reformation Anglicanism is one of receiving over and against offering, even if in some secondary ways the language of sacrifice was allowed by Reformation divines. What I’ve written here cannot be a full proof of that position, but it certainly offers some evidence for it.

What’s more, as I’ve written before, I do think that this Reformation focus on the Lord’s Supper as something we receive rather than something we give has real merit. While I am not allergic to all accounts of eucharistic sacrifice and would happily administer the Lord’s Supper according to the historic American rite, I think that this historic Protestant — historic Anglican — view of the Supper allows it to function beautifully as a liturgical enactment of the Gospel.

That said, the historic Protestant position is certainly open to criticism. One might find fault with the dichotomy insisted on by Luther with such force between sacrament and sacrifice. In criticizing such a dichotomy, it must be admitted that one is on reasonably solid patristic ground as well as in accord with much current anthropology and sociology of sacrifice! One might also argue that the Protestant concern about a re-sacrificing of Christ in the mass is a misunderstanding, willful or not, of what the late medieval or Tridentine view actually was. One might argue — as Mr. Luke does at various points — that with the real late medieval/early modern abuses around sacrifice removed, a more disciplined account of eucharistic sacrifice might once again be foregrounded. But to do this responsibly, it is vital to construe as carefully as possible the actual substance of Protestant approaches to the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass. Unfortunately, Mr. Luke has not done so to date, though I hope he will do so in the future.

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A reminder that our next Zoom Bullinger conversation will be tomorrow, Saturday 8 August, at 2 pm Eastern. We will discuss sermons 5-9 of the third decade. This will get us ready for a discussion of Law and Gospel later in August.

Here is the Zoom link.

I look forward to seeing you then!

Best wishes,
Ben

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I’m going to need to move our next Zoom discussion back a few weeks because of some travel plans. Let’s plan on meeting next on August 8 to discuss sermons 5-9 of the third decade. This will get us ready for a discussion of Law and Gospel later in August.

Here is the Zoom link.

I look forward to seeing you then!

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The Decades begins with three sermons on the doctrine of the Word — where it comes from, its purpose, and how it is to be rightly exposited. It turns out that rightly expositing the Word requires faith, so Bullinger then turns to the question of faith. He provides three sermons on the fides qua (the faith by which one believes) and three sermons on the fides quae (the faith which is believed, eg, the content of the faith); the latter three are organized around an exposition of the Apostles’ Creed. Love is also necessary for the right exposition of the Word, Bullinger follows Augustine in arguing, so the first Decade ends with a sermon on the love of God and neighbor.

It is, of course, the Law that teaches us how it is we are to love God and neighbor, so the second Decade begins a treatment of the Law that we’re still in half-way through the third. After a first sermon looking at natural and human law, Bullinger begins a discussion of divine law, which he divides into three parts: moral, ceremonial, and judicial. He then treats the moral law through an exposition of the Ten Commandments from the second sermon of the second Decade to the fourth sermon of the third, with, as we have seen, extended multi-sermon treatments of political theology and how Christians are to relate to temporal goods. Now, with the sermon we’re about to consider, Bullinger switches to a discussion of the ceremonial law — that is, the rules given in the Old Testament for the worship of God. The ceremonial law will occupy this and the sixth sermon of the third Decade; the seventh sermon will discuss the judicial law before Bullinger turns to the question of the Law’s fulfillment/abrogation in Christ and Christian freedom.

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The last few months, I’ve noticed a bit of a drop-off in participants in our monthly Bullinger Zoom conversations. This is not necessarily a problem — obviously there is no expectation that you participate in these! — but I am wondering if I need to do them differently going forward.

If you’re not really interested in participating …

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It’s time for another Zoom conversation about the Decades! We will be focusing on Bullinger’s treatment of the seventh to tenth commandments, and the discussion of how to bear calamity included in his discussion of the eighth commandment. I’ll have posts on sermons 3 and 4 up by then.

Here is the Zoom link.

I look forward t…

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I’m very sorry to have dropped the ball on the April Bullinger call; I will add an extra one in sometime down the line. However, I do want to get back on track and approximately follow the reading and meeting schedule I posted back in December.

So: let’s have a chat this Saturday at 2 pm Eastern! We will focus on Bullinger…

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I expect that for many of my readers, Bullinger’s sermons on the magistrate — and perhaps especially the eighth sermon, in which he defends at length the right and duty of the magistrate to punish heretics with death — will be among the least obviously edifying in the Decades as a whole. Bullinger’s convictions here are hard to square with the moral intuitions that most of us moderns have about freedom of conscience or of belief.1 Even those of us who are sympathetic to establishmentarianism or skeptical that American-style separation of church and state is the only acceptable model of church-state interaction will probably blanch at some of what Bullinger has to say. And, of course, it does not escape me that many of the loudest voices in the North American church today expressing interest in early modern Reformed political theology — the more intellectual wing of the ‘Christian nationalists’ — are doing so to legitimize what in my view are utterly reprehensible politics. And so for all these reasons, especially if you aren’t used to engaging with ideas like Bullinger’s, reading these sermons might seem not on obviously beneficial way to spend one’s time.

But in fact, I think these sermons are worth taking seriously, that their logic is worth understanding on its own terms and that we should resist, at least a bit, the immediate jump to critique. I think this for a couple reasons.

First of all, it is worth remembering that Bullinger’s position about the religious responsibilities of the magistrate is much closer to the standard view of Christians across time2 than the positions I and, I expect, many or all of you hold. It’s true that in the sixteenth century, you start to find Anabaptists and other radicals advocating for something a lot closer to modern ideas of freedom of belief, with Sebastian Castellio’s De haereticis, an sint persequendi (Concerning Heretics, Whether They Should Be Persecuted) being a particularly important text. But it’s very much a minority view then and afterwards,3 and it is hard to find significant articulations of the value of religious tolerance beforehand. This doesn’t mean, of course, that Bullinger is right — but it does mean that this gives us a chance to recognize the historical contingency of our own moral positions, to ponder that common sense about the religious role of the magistrate for most sincere Christians throughout history was very different than what we take for granted.

And then, as to Bullinger’s articulation specifically, I think it is helpful to read Bullinger’s political theology as an expression of his commitment to the essential unity of the Old and New Covenants. One might accuse him of an insufficient Christological disciplining of his political ethics (this is basically the Anabaptist critique). But he might retort that a lot of modern thinking about the relationship between religion and the magistrate can make no use of the vast bulk of the Biblical material dealing with that question, because that material is in the Old Testament. The Bible, after all, spends a lot of time dealing with the political history of Israel and Judah. Bullinger, rather than writing this material off as irrelevant or flat-out immoral for Christians, instead sees these texts as providing insights about God’s design for government which must be harmonized with the teachings of Christ, to be sure, but cannot be simply discarded. And so, whether or not we are compelled by Bullinger’s argument, we might still learn from his determination to take both testaments seriously as Christian scripture.

Finally, Bullinger’s evident conviction that Christians ought to think biblically, theologically about the magistrate strikes me as absolutely right. I worry that we too often accept the modern relegation of religion to the private sphere, granting that it may have its place in individual morality but can never speak authoritatively to or about public life — that we, in effect, cede thinking about the political to ostensibly (but not actually) secular reason. I fear that even most Christian political engagement amounts to little more than finding biblical proof texts for one party’s positions or another. Bullinger is trying to think Christianly about our common life — and to that extent at the very least, we ought to follow him.

But enough throat-clearing; on to the sermon.

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