random eucharistic trivia for ur wednesday afternoon

[queenlua]

Consider this a sneak preview of my inevitable longer review of Lyndal Roper's excellent Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (which I already extenstively shitposted about on Tumblr), prompted by this interesting post about "wait WHY do so many churches use those bland wafers instead of actual bread for communion" (spoilers: the poster thinks they are Theologically Incorrect lol).

OKAY, SO. When I first dropped in on an Episcopal church service this past summer (the shit I do for fanfiction research...), I thought it was basically like any other Protestant church but with a fancier choir, right?

That is NOT THE CASE. Their order of service is very Ornamental™ and Ritualistic™ and Catholic-ish™—lots of standing and sitting and kneelin', lots of people doin' the sign of the cross over themselves, lots of relic-lookin' things getting toted about, the works.

Luckily for my rasied-southern-baptist-wtf-is-going-on-here ass, they gave me a little program that explained everything, and when it came time for communion, this bit from the program stood out to me:

"If you do not wish to drink from the common cup, please cross your arms in front of your chest as you pass by the chalice. The full grace of the sacrament is received with only the bread."

I thought to myself, "oh, that's nice, a little nod to recovering alcoholics." Like, it would suck if you were quite religious and were forced to choose between "receiving the full grace of the sacrament" and "violating the No Alcohol thing I'm desperately clinging to," right! Good thing the bread alone confers the full blessings and all that.

And, well, that probably is still nice if you're a recovering alcoholic, but the actual origin of that bit of doctrine has nothing to do with AA-sensitivity and everything to do with the very earliest battles of the Protestant Reformation.

See, back in the day, while laity could eat the bread of communion, only priests could drink the wine. (They are More Sacred and More Pure and Better Than You and all that.) Reformers had beef with this, as well as a whole bunch of other aspects of communion:

The arguments about Communion dated back to the time of the Wittenberg disturbances in 1521-22, when first the radical monk Gabriel Zwilling and then Karlstadt introduced a new service in German. Karlstadt had tried to encourage people to take the sacrament in their own hands, rather than just receive it from a priest [by having it placed directly on their tongues], because he wanted his congregation to experience for themselves what it meant to say that every Christian is a priest. Dressed in ordinary clothes, not ecclesiastical vestments, Karlstadt had also abolished the elevation, where the sacrament was raised up for all to see at the moment of consecration, as the bread miraculously became the body of Christ. Everyone took Communion in both kinds, bread and wine. As we have seen, Luther undid all these reforms on his return to Wittenberg, and when he introduced a new Mass in 1523 it was in Latin, and the elevation was retained.

Wait, Luther? As in Martin Luther? Wasn't he like THE guy who was trying to reform the church?

Well, yes and no. Certainly he kicked things off with his famous 95 Theses & his stand at the subsequent Diet of Worms, but it turns out, as his fame grew & his movement grew vastly outside his influence, he ended up doing a lot of "wait, no, not like that" meddling among his fellow reformers and the various splinter groups. While Luther grew to loathe the Pope during his lifetime, his aim for a long time really was to reform the Catholic church rather than split away, and there were some aspects of Catholic orthodoxy he was really attached to that most of his fellow Protestants wanted to see torn down. (He wanted to keep confession & abhorred the idea of believer's baptism, for two examples where he wrote particularly vigorously on the topic.)

Anyway, the "you can offer communion in both kinds, but make sure everyone knows just having the bread is sufficient" seems to have originated in some negotiations held at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg, when the Catholic church was desperately trying to find some compromise to be had with the Lutherans in order to not split the church (and uh maybe not have a hugely violent & destructive war within the next century):

When the debate turned to the sacrament, it appeared that the Catholic side was surprisingly willing to allow the Lutherans to give the chalice to the laity, if they also taught that receiving the sacrament in one kind—the Catholic practice of offering only the bread to the laity—was sufficient for salvation. Again it seemed agreement was possible, at least until a full Church council was held, since the offer was in line with Luther's own position when, on his return from the Wartburg, he had attempted to moderate Karlstadt's reforms. Nor was the issue of clerical marriage as problematic as it had first seemed: The Catholics were again willing to tolerate those marriages that had already taken place "until a council is held." Moreover, on the fundamental issue of the Reformation, the Catholics were even apparently ready to agree that salvation is by faith and grace, not by works alone—and extraordinary concession, and an apparenty victory for Augustinian theology.

My jaw hit the floor when I read that whole bit, by the way. Conceding on faith alone!!! conceding on clerical marriage!!! what!!!

It all wound up being a bit of a moot point, though, because at this point Luther had grown old & crotchety & was clearly only interested in My Way Or The Highway-type compromises:

Luther, however, accused the Catholics of paying lip service tot he importance of faith while continuing to preach indulgences and works, and insisted Communion must be offered in both kinds. While the Catholics offered to let the Lutherans continue with their practices while they would continue with theirs—holding Masses for the dead, for example—Luther objected to this on the grounds that it would reintroduce the idea of the Mass as a sacrifice [. . .] [W]hat finally kept the two sides apart was the absence of trust—on marriage, the sacraments, and other issues, the evangelicals simply did not believe that the Catholics meant what they said, or that they would keep their word. They feared that concessions would lead tot heir being crushed at a Church council that would be held outside Germany and set up to defeat them. The result was not inevitable, but rather a narrowly missed opportunity to prevent the splitting of the Catholic Church.

A fun little AU to speculate about, though honestly I'm uncertain whether a schism could've been staved off forever. Already at the time, the anabaptists were growing in number & particularly ungovernable, despite being despised by Catholics and Lutherans both, and while Lutherans were the most famous church reformers, different groups in different nations were arriving at similar ideas by similar means.

Funnily enough, the Catholic church ended up ceding the "communion in two kinds" point eventually—any Catholic church you go to nowadays will offer both the bread and the wine, which ends up making the whole issue seem like A Lot Of Fuss Over Nothing—but it sure seemed important to people at the time!

Anyway, that is presumably how the little note about "bread alone is enough, fyi" wound up on the leaflet of some random Episcopal church here in the year 2024!

Comments

[ioplokon]

The Catholic perspective is that Anglicans are basically Catholic (not like, doctrinally but vibes-wise). Though the Catholic perspective generally is that everyone longs secretly for the bosom of the Church so...

[queenlua]

heh. the Southern Baptist point of view on both Anglicans and Catholics is that they are WRONG and practicing IDOLATRY, etc etc... like they're still Christian but it's sus :P kind of funny to lookit how all the denominations see each other haha