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Memorialist Communion

Pastoral TLDR;

Memorialism, the view of Zwingli and of most evangelical congregations today, teaches that the Lord's Supper is a symbolic act of remembrance rather than a means of grace or a vehicle of Christ's presence. It honours Christ's command to remember and it is right that the Supper is not a repeated sacrifice. It fails on three counts: it cannot account for koinonia in 1 Corinthians 10:16, it cannot account for the judgment of 1 Corinthians 11:30, and it cannot account for the word remembrance it takes as its own proof text.

Table of Contents

  1. #The claim
  2. #Where the view came from
  3. #Scriptural support
  4. #Historical witness
  5. #What should be conceded to Zwingli
  6. #Where it fails
  7. #Where I land
  8. #Sources

The Claim

The bread and wine are symbols and tangible reminders of Christ's once-for-all sacrifice. Nothing changes in their substance, and Christ is not present in or with the elements. The Supper is a covenant meal of remembrance in which believers reflect on Christ's death, proclaim His gospel, and express gratitude by faith.

Where the view Came from

In 1509 Cornelius Hoen, cataloguing a library in the Lowlands, encountered Wessel Gansfort's work on the Eucharist and reworked its idea of spiritual communion into a radical critique of transubstantiation, arguing that est means significat. The letter reached Zurich by 1523 and Zwingli published it in 1525. Hoen also supplied two images Zwingli would use heavily: the Eucharist as a ring given by a groom to reassure his bride, a pledge; and commemoration as commemoration of someone absent (McGrath, 2012).

The public break came at the Marburg Colloquy (1529), where Luther chalked Hoc est corpus meum on the table and Zwingli countered with Hoc facite in meam commemorationem, "do this in remembrance of me." For Zwingli the Supper is a memorial ordinance rather than a mystical union, because Christ's risen body is in heaven and not in the sacrament.

Scriptural Support

The Christological argument was Zwingli's strongest card. Scripture and the creeds affirm Christ is seated at the right hand of God, and "wherever Christ is now, it isn't in the eucharist. He can't be in two places at once" (McGrath, 2012). Allison records Zwingli leaning on Augustine: "The body of Christ has to be in some particular place in heaven by reason of its character as a true body… The body of Christ is not in several places at one and the same time any more than our bodies are" (Zwingli, quoted in Allison, 2012).

Note that Spiritual Presence accepts this argument entirely. The disagreement is not about where Christ's body is. It is about whether His absence in the flesh means His absence altogether.

Historical Witness

Memorialism was always a minority position in the Reformation. Even Calvin, who denied a local or physical presence just as firmly as Zwingli, insisted on a real spiritual communion through the Holy Spirit. Memorialism sees no such communion in the act itself, only in the faith of the participant.

Schaff notes the doctrine's concerning history. Zwingli's theory "did not pass into any of the leading Reformed confessions; but it was adopted by the Arminians, Socinians, Unitarians, and Rationalists," who deny the divinity of Christ that Zwingli himself held firmly, "and thus deprive the Lord's Supper of its deeper significance and power" (Schaff, History, vol. VII).

What Should Be Conceded to Zwingli

His polemical target was correct. Zwingli was fighting the Mass as a work offered by man to God, and against it he rightly stressed the Supper "as a gift of God to man" (Schaff, History, vol. VII). Everything in The Mass and the Finality of Calvary vindicates that instinct.

His mature position was less thin than his reputation. Schaff quotes Zwingli's Confession to King Francis I:

We believe that Christ is truly present in the Lord's Supper; yea, that there is no communion without such presence… We believe that the true body of Christ is eaten in the communion, not in a gross and carnal manner, but in a sacramental and spiritual manner by the religious, believing and pious heart.

Schaff's judgment: "This passage comes so near the Calvinistic view that it can hardly be distinguished from it," and Calvin "did injustice to Zwingli" in his harsher moments.

The problem is not so much what Zwingli finally believed, it is what "Zwinglianism" became in the hands of people who read only his polemics. Schaff says: "Zwingli in his polemic writings laid so much stress upon the absence of Christ's body, that the positive truth of His spiritual presence was not sufficiently emphasized."

Where it Fails

Its Own Proof Text Defeats it

This is the argument that decides it: Anamnesis - Remembrance and the Lord's Supper.

The whole memorialist case rests on "do this in remembrance of me," and on Hoen's premise that commemoration "clearly points to commemoration of 'a person who is absent (at least, physically absent)'" (McGrath, 2012).

But that is precisely what the covenantal sense of anamnesis does not mean. In the Passover the remembering makes the remembered event present to the participant's identity. Jon Levenson's summary: "History is telescoped into collective biography. What your ancestors saw is what you saw… Telling the story brings it alive." The rabbinic liturgy puts it flatly: "Each man is obligated to see himself as if he came out of Egypt."

Hughes Oliphant Old reaches the same conclusion from the liturgical side: neither Jesus nor Paul "had in mind a simple mental recollection. They had in mind far more" (Old, 2002).

The primary objection

The word Zwingli used to prove absence is a word whose native use is to abolish distance. Memorialism is defeated by its own passage.

It Cannot account for Koinonia

Paul asks whether the cup and the bread are not a participation in the blood and body of Christ (1 Cor 10:16), and he asks it in the middle of an argument designed to make attendance at pagan temple meals unthinkable. "You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons" (10:21).

A memorial does not create a conflict of allegiance. Paul's argument assumes some type of contact. The whole case is set out in Koinonia - Participation in the Body and Blood.

Even Wayne Grudem (not a sacramentalist) warns his own side here: "We must be careful here, as with baptism, to avoid the mistake of overreacting to Roman Catholic teaching and maintaining that the Lord's Supper is merely symbolic and not a means of grace" (Grudem, 2020).

It Cannot account for the Judgment of 1 Corinthians 11

Paul says some of the Corinthians were weak, ill, and had died as a result of taking the Supper in an unworthy manner (1 Cor 11:27-30). This is not describing the consequences of mishandling a metaphor.

Ridderbos states the positive point memorialism has to answer. The elements are not magical, and "there is no other gift in the sacrament than from the hand of the Giver," yet "it is the living presence of Christ, in accordance with the arrangement established in his own words of institution, which in the elements effects communion with the sacrifice once made by him and which can transform the gift in the Supper into a judgment" (Ridderbos, 1975).

Something is being handled at this table that memorabilia could not be handled badly enough to make anyone ill. The full exegesis is in 1 Corinthians 11v17-34 - Discerning the Body.

It Makes the Meal a Human Work

If Christ is not present in any way, the sacrament becomes a dramatic object lesson. It divorces the sign from the thing signified, leaving a rite that neither conveys nor participates in the grace it commemorates. Luther's mockery has stayed in circulation for five centuries because it is funny and because it is fair: if all we do is remember, we may as well eat cake. The Wesleyan tradition landed something more damning still, and Dunning records the memorialist theory being called "the doctrine of 'real absence'" (Dunning, 1988).

Memorialism also places all the spiritual benefit inside the mind and heart of the believer. There is no objective presence and no divine action in the Supper itself, which makes the meal an entirely subjective exercise. In Luke 22:19 Jesus "took bread… gave thanks… broke it… and gave it to them" as a divine act of giving. A sacrament should convey what it signifies, not just point at it.

Once the sacraments are understood "exclusively as human acts of obedience rather than as God's means of grace, disagreements over symbolic and realistic theories are comparatively insignificant" (Horton, 2011). This is why Sacrament or Ordinance is important

Ignatius, Justin Martyr and Cyril of Jerusalem all affirmed Christ's real presence in the Supper, and Trent anathematised anyone claiming the Eucharist is "only a sign or figure," which was aimed directly at Zurich. Memorialism can be held, but it cannot be held as the historic faith of the church.

Where I Land

Bare memorialism fails, and it fails based on it's own proof texts.

It cannot account for koinonia, it cannot account for the judgment in 1 Corinthians 11, and, most tellingly, it cannot account for the word remembrance. Zwingli used a term whose native covenantal use is to make a past event present to the participant's identity, and used it to argue for absence.

Beyond the exegesis, the position makes the Supper a human work rather than a divine gift, which is a strange destination for a movement built on grace.

I will say that this is the view most of our congregations actually hold, and they did not arrive at it intentionally. They arrived at it because nobody ever taught them anything else, and because the alternatives sounded Catholic. Billings is right that remembrance piety "cultivates a congregational perception of the gospel as the forgiveness of sins through the cross," which is a good thing to have cultivated. The objection is about proportion: the reduced view "fails not because of what it includes, but because of what it displaces" (Billings, 2018).

So the pastoral line is not that these people have taken remembrance too seriously. It is that nobody has yet shown them what the word means.

Other Communion views: Transubstantiation | Consubstantiation or Sacramental Union | Spiritual Presence

Sources