Introduction
During the initial decade of the Protestant Reformation, the German Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier (1480–1528)Footnote 1 functioned as a transitional figure between radical and magisterial reform. This observation is seen most clearly in the fact that Hubmaier, while concurring with his Anabaptist coreligionists on the necessity of believers’ baptism, dissented from their anti-statism and strict pacifism.Footnote 2 Earning his doctor theologiae from the University of Ingolstadt under famous Catholic polemicist John Eck in 1512, Hubmaier was an essentially independent thinker who employed his academic training in an attempt to formulate doctrine that not only transcended the controversies of his day but also pointed Christians to the necessity of spiritual formation within a life of common discipleship. With this approach, Hubmaier turned to the Eucharist, second only to justification as the most divisive doctrine of the sixteenth century.Footnote 3 Hubmaier objected to Roman Catholic transubstantiation, Lutheran consubstantiation, and Zwinglian sacramentarianism on the grounds that all of them, in their concern with the status of the elements, had lost sight of the internal transformation that Christ accomplishes in the faithful during the meal.
This piece will argue that Hubmaier articulated an original doctrine of the Eucharist in which believers themselves, not the bread and wine, serve as the bearers of the real presence of Christ. For Hubmaier, the congregation as a whole and its individual members are literally consubstantiated into the physical body of Christ, as they simultaneously possess Christ's human Wesen (essence or substance) and their own human Wesen during the Supper. My thesis is simultaneously an advance of and a challenge to current scholarship on Hubmaier. It is an advance of current scholarship in that the premises from which it is derived have been established by John D. Rempel, Eddie Mabry, and Torsten Bergsten, the three scholars who have addressed the topic of Hubmaier's Eucharistic theology since 1960.Footnote 4 But it is a challenge to these scholars’ shared conclusion that Hubmaier's Eucharist is exclusively an ethical reality in which Christ is not substantially present.Footnote 5 Although this conclusion admittedly presents all three scholars with troublesome Hubmaier loci that they are forced to explain away either as inconsistencies in the Reformer's thought or as metaphorical language, it is the only conclusion that can be reached if one assumes, as is typically taken for granted, that the elements constitute the sole possible vehicles for Christ's substantial presence.Footnote 6 However, I will show that it is precisely this presupposition that ought to be questioned, as it significantly underestimates the radical nature of Hubmaier's Eucharistic theology. Such radicalism is to be found not only in the ethical fruits of the Eucharist but also in the fundamental structure of the Eucharist itself.
Accordingly, this piece will first explain the theological and scriptural building blocks of Hubmaier's Eucharistic theology and then delineate its profound ethical implications. For through this consubstantiation, contended Hubmaier, Jesus anoints believers with the necessary and sufficient grace for going out into the world and there bearing the fruit of the Spirit, performing compassionate deeds, and living in self-sacrificial love.
Theological Presuppositions of Hubmaier's Eucharist
Parting company from the typical Anabaptist view that the Eucharist is an ordinance that merely symbolizes a previously existing spiritual reality, Hubmaier recognized the Eucharist as a sacrament in the classical sense of the term, i.e., the visible sign that communicates the invisible grace that it signifies.Footnote 7 This fact is revealed by his description of what happens when the congregation partakes of the elements coupled with his explicit classification of the Eucharist as “the sacrament” (das Sacrament) and “the sacrament of the altar” (das Sacrament des Altars).Footnote 8 In his Eucharistic liturgy, Eine Form des Nachtmals Christi, Hubmaier directed the celebrant (an ordained pastor by virtue of the congregation's previous commission to preach and administer the sacramentsFootnote 9) to inform the congregation both before and after consuming the bread and wine that they respectively are about to receive and have just received the grace of God. Immediately before breaking the bread, the minister must instruct the flock, “Now eat and drink with one another in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.…May the Lord communicate to us his grace. Amen.”Footnote 10 Similarly, after everyone has drunk the wine, the pastor is to summon the congregation to be seated in order to hear the “conclusion”: “Arise and depart in the peace of Christ Jesus. The grace of God be with us all. Amen.”Footnote 11 Here we see that for Hubmaier, the dispensation of grace in the Eucharist amounts to more than simply a theological point: it is a living reality that the laity needs to appreciate. This observation is reinforced by one negative and one positive piece of evidence. Negatively, Hubmaier made no attempt to explain to his congregation how grace is communicated. While we shall treat Hubmaier's proposal of the manner in which grace is communicated later in this piece, at this juncture it suffices to point out Hubmaier's concern with the laity's knowledge that they are receiving grace and not their knowledge of how such reception transpires. Positively, Hubmaier insisted that only church members “with reverence and hearts desiring grace”Footnote 12 can participate in the sacred meal. Given the classical definition of a sacrament, the foregoing evidence proves that Hubmaier both regarded and taught his spiritual charges to regard the Eucharist as a sacrament.
Due to its notion of the real presence, Hubmaier's model of the Eucharist is distinctly predicated upon Luther's view of the communicatio idiomatum as opposed to both the prevailing Catholic view of the communicatio and the wholesale denial of the communicatio by Zwingli and Hubmaier's Anabaptist contemporaries.Footnote 13 This fact is altogether remarkable since neither Luther nor Catholic theologians based their doctrines of the real presence upon the communicatio. A doctrine with a long and complex historical development reaching back to at least the late fourth century, the communicatio achieved its Catholic definition through widespread consensus in High and Late Scholasticism. This consensus maintained that every necessary attribute of the divine Logos, such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence or ubiquity, can also be predicated of Jesus's humanity, even though Jesus's human nature does not actually possess these attributes. Consequently, one can rightfully speak about the human Jesus having all power in heaven and earth in the sense that omnipotence belongs to the divine nature that Jesus possesses, but not in the sense that his human nature is omnipotent in and of itself.Footnote 14 With this nominal conception, sixteenth-century Catholic theologians neither could logically deduce nor did actually posit the communicatio as a basis for the real presence. Rather, they grounded the real presence in the sacrificial character of the mass and the theology of the priesthood.Footnote 15
Against the backdrop of the Catholic view, Luther was the first to argue for what may be styled a realist communicatio idiomatum, in which every necessary attribute of the divine Logos is actually imparted to Jesus's human nature at the incarnation. For Luther, therefore, the human Jesus is omnipotent not merely because he possesses an omnipotent divine nature but also because his human nature is omnipotent in and of itself by virtue of the hypostatic union.Footnote 16 Luther emphasized this point in his polemical works against the Zwinglians and Spiritualists between 1525 and 1527, the years in which all of Hubmaier's Eucharistic writings were composed.Footnote 17 Hence Luther asserted:
Moreover, we believe that Christ, according to his human nature, is put over all creatures [Eph. 1:22] and fills all things, as Paul says in Eph. 4[:10]. Not only according to his divine nature, but also according to his human nature, he is a lord of all things, has all things in his hand, and is present everywhere. If I am to follow the fanatics who say that this is not fitting, then I must deny Christ.Footnote 18
From this realist communicatio, Luther could have logically deduced (but, as we shall see, did not deduce) his doctrine of the real presence. For if Jesus's humanity, like his divinity, is present everywhere, then no theological barriers prevent that humanity from being specially present in the Eucharist. In his 1528 Confession Concerning Christ's Supper, Luther acknowledged the possibility of this deduction: “When I proved that Christ's body is everywhere because the right hand of God is everywhere, I did so—as I quite openly explained at the time—in order to show at least in one way how God could bring it about that Christ is in heaven and his body in the Supper at the same time.”Footnote 19 But Luther insisted this was nothing more than a possibility in which he placed no personal stock. This is because, for Luther, humans lack the epistemic resources to know the actual way Christ is substantially present in the Eucharist: “For we also do not know how it occurs…this mode is altogether incomprehensible, beyond our reason, and can be maintained only with faith, in the Word.”Footnote 20 In short, given his realist view Luther could logically deduce but did not actually posit the communicatio as a basis for the real presence. Instead, Luther grounded the real presence in the truth of the Word of God, particularly in Christ's promise that hoc est corpus meum. As Luther famously explained in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church:
When I fail to understand how bread can be the body of Christ, I, for one, will take my understanding prisoner and bring it into obedience to Christ; and, holding fast with a simple mind to His words, I will firmly believe…that the bread is the body of Christ.…Though philosophy cannot grasp it, yet faith can.…Why not…hold to the words of Christ in simple faith, satisfied not to understand what takes place, and content to know that the true body of Christ is there by virtue of the words of institution?Footnote 21
Hubmaier held a realist's view of the communicatio, for which he was directly indebted to Luther. This fact follows inescapably from the conjunction of three lines of evidence. First, Luther originally proposed this view in January 1525 (Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments), which predates Hubmaier's first articulation of it in April 1525 (Several Theses Concerning the Instruction of the Mass). Second, between January and April 1525, no theologian except Luther subscribed to the realist communicatio (and, incidentally, the only two theologians who held this view between 1525 and Hubmaier's death in 1528 were Luther and Hubmaier). Third, Hubmaier's heavy reliance upon Luther is well known among scholars of Anabaptism, whose verdict Mabry summarizes: “Among [the] Anabaptists, perhaps no one was more influenced by the writings of Luther than Hubmaier.”Footnote 22 Although Hubmaier thus received his realist communicatio from Luther, Hubmaier parted company from Luther by grounding his doctrine of the real presence upon the communicatio. Consequently, Hubmaier was the first theologian who both could logically deduce and did actually posit the communicatio as a basis for the real presence. To use the later terminology of debates between Lutheran and Reformed thinkers, Hubmaier subscribed to a communicatio idiomatum in abstracto (the flow of divine attributes into the human nature of Christ, which thenceforth intrinsically possesses those attributes) rather than a communicatio idiomatum in concreto (the predication of divine attributes to the human nature of Christ, which intrinsically lacks those attributes but holds them only through its union with the divine nature).Footnote 23 While Hubmaier's version of the communicatio makes the real presence possible in that the ubiquity of Jesus's humanity allows for that humanity to be specially present in the Eucharist, Hubmaier made the much stronger claim that the communicatio guarantees the real presence. We shall now proceed to explain how Hubmaier attempted to substantiate this claim.
In crafting his case, Hubmaier employed the standard typology of the modes of Christ's presence, which was stock in trade for Eucharistic debates in the 1520s.Footnote 24 In particular, he appropriated the distinction between the definitive presence of God and the repletive presence of God.Footnote 25 This dichotomy maintained that God, who is by nature a timeless and spaceless spiritual being, is differently present in various realms of existence depending on the quality of his power of operation manifested therein. God's definitive presence denotes his omnipotent and unapproachably glorious dwelling in the heavenly realm of spirits. Conversely, God's repletive presence signifies his filling of all space-time locations (i.e., all points within the universe) without being restricted in any way by space or time. In much the same way as the human soul or mind is not spatially located but is wholly present at all points in its physical body, so God, the Supreme Mind, is not spatio-temporally located but is wholly present at all points within the universe.Footnote 26 Synthesizing this typology with his realist communicatio, Hubmaier argued that since Christ is the second person of the Godhead and his human nature possesses the same attributes as his divine nature, the categories of definitive and repletive presence equally apply to Christ's divinity and humanity after the ascension.Footnote 27 Thus, while Christ's physical body is definitively present at the right hand of God the Father, his body is repletively present at all points in the space-time universe without being limited by it. Hubmaier summarized his twofold model of the presence of Christ “bodily according to his humanity” as follows: on the one hand, “he has a definite place ‘in heaven, in heaven,’ and not everywhere”; on the other hand, “because the Godhead is everywhere…the Lord Jesus is with [the visible church] himself…bodily…until the end of the world.”Footnote 28
Since Hubmaier did not proceed from this model to identify the bread and wine—in previous thought the sole possible vehicles for Christ's substantial presence—as the bearers of the real presence, Hubmaier scholars have found this model bewildering, out of place, and even pointless. Mabry states his complaint succinctly: “Hubmaier's real confusion at this point was that of Christ's bodily and spiritual presence.”Footnote 29 Rempel fleshes out this cognitive dissonance with Hubmaier's model:
There are shortcomings in the case Hubmaier is putting forth. Its propositions are not related to one another. They are placed on top of one another, like stacking chairs of different designs, in the hope that their cumulative impact will be convincing. The pile of propositions is, like odd-sized stacking chairs, both unstable and difficult to disentangle. This heaping up of propositions expresses a mind no longer at home in the theological debate of the day, a mind on the boundary, impatient with other theologians’ lingering preoccupation with the elements.Footnote 30
These criticisms, however, are only as strong as the presupposition on which they are based, i.e., that for Hubmaier, the elements constitute the only possible bearers of the real presence. But if Hubmaier regarded something besides the elements as bearing the real presence, then these criticisms fall to the ground. We shall see that this is, in fact, the situation, as Hubmaier regarded the human participants themselves as bearing the real presence. However, Hubmaier stressed that humans could only bear the real presence through receiving the Eucharist. Hence there exists no other means for humanity to bear the real presence save for the sacramental acts of communally eating the bread and drinking the wine,Footnote 31 due to Christ's institution and divine empowerment of the Eucharist for that specific purpose. As a result, Hubmaier's case proves to be quite coherent, and the aforementioned dissonance is easily resolved. To argue for the human participants as the bearers of the real presence, Hubmaier skillfully fused theological construction with biblical exegesis, directing his attention to the Johannine account of the Last Supper.
Hubmaier's Scriptural Development of Eucharistic Doctrine
Whereas Luther, Zwingli, and most Anabaptists found the exegetical sub-stantiation for their conceptions of the Eucharist largely (if not exclusively) in the Synoptic Gospels,Footnote 32 Hubmaier elucidated his view of Christ's presence in the Eucharist by appealing primarily to the more lengthy version of Jesus's final meal with his disciples in the Gospel of John (chs. 13–17), with which he harmonized the Pauline form of the words of institution and instructions concerning the Supper (1 Cor 11:23–24). Since John 18:1 indicates that it was only after Jesus had completed the so-called high priestly prayer that he and his disciples went out over the Brook Kidron, Hubmaier insisted that the events of John 14–17, and not just John 13, must all be interpreted as occurring at the Last Supper. Consequently, John 14–17 possesses profound ramifications for the church's ongoing practice of the Lord's Supper. On this score Rempel correctly observes, “Hubmaier was trying to actualize a Christianity whose main tenets were put forth in certain thought patterns originating in the Fourth Gospel.…It is the Johannine world and spirit which left their mark on him and gave him the structures of his thought.”Footnote 33
Textually central for Hubmaier in the Fourth Gospel's depiction of the Supper was John 17:26: “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known, in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”Footnote 34 Because they are the final words Jesus spoke at the Last Supper, Hubmaier contended that it not only pertains directly to the Lord's Supper but also describes exactly what takes place when the Eucharist is celebrated. The Reformer explained, “So the bread that we break means and commemorates the communion of Christ's body with us, that he is our own,” and “he gave himself for us through the drink of the communion of his blood”; hence “the body and blood of Christ communes with us all.”Footnote 35 Here Hubmaier maintained that the Lord's Supper is both a commemoration of Christ's presence and far more than a commemoration. It also means the communion of Christ's body with the recipients; that is to say, through participation in the bread and wine, the recipients literally commune with the physical body and blood of Christ. Consistent with his aforesaid dissonance and its underlying assumption that only the elements can bear the real presence, Rempel thus attempts here to explain away Hubmaier's words:
The text is claiming that through participation in the bread and cup, we commune with the body and blood of Christ.…The quotation under examination seems to be a remnant of the traditional view of the mass, temporarily existing side by side with elements which are soon to squeeze it out.…Novel here is the use of classical eucharistic language with reference to a communion which is not sacramental but ethical.Footnote 36
However, for Hubmaier sacramental communion versus ethical communion represents a false dichotomy, as the communion entails an ontological change in the participants that invariably bears ethical fruit. It should be noted that Rempel himself finds (and emphasizes) that Hubmaier's Eucharist aims at generating ethical improvement in its participants. However, Rempel views such improvement as contingently occurring through the vehicle of moral suasion, while Hubmaier's argument runs deeper than this and claims that such improvement necessarily occurs through the vehicle of ontological transformation. Hubmaier aimed to justify this idea by combining the preceding exegesis of John 17:26 with his interpretation of the Pauline words of institution.
Hubmaier's most precisely articulated definition of the meaning of the Eucharist sprang from his viewing the Pauline words of institution—“This is my body given for you; do this in my remembrance” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in my remembrance” (1 Cor 11:24–25)—through Johannine lenses. Hubmaier summed up the sacrament's significance in the following formula: “the body of Christ in remembrance” (der leib Christi in der gedechtnuß) and “the blood of Christ in remembrance” (das blut Christi in der gedechtnuß), that is, “a living remembrance” (ein lebendige gedechtnuß).Footnote 37 To explain what this formula means, Hubmaier appealed to his established dichotomy between the definitive and repletive presence of Christ's physical body. At the respective moments that believers, in the act of remembrance, eat the bread and drink the wine, Christ, whose humanity is definitively present (bstimbte stat) in heaven, fills the believers with the repletive presence (gsättigt stat) of his body and blood in a special sacramental way.Footnote 38 However, Hubmaier refused to elaborate on how this sacramental repletive presence differs from the typical repletive presence of Christ's humanity except to confess that such a matter is a mystery that no human can fathom: “Since you discern that this matter of the Supper is so lofty and significant, we can neither apprehend nor understand it with human reason.”Footnote 39 Reinforcing his model of the real presence in the Supper, Hubmaier wrote, “The eating of bread is the body of Christ really, but just in the celebrated remembrance…and the drinking of wine…[is] the blood of Christ in the celebrated remembrance.”Footnote 40 Notice here that not the bread but the person engaged in the sacramental act of bread-eating bears the body of Christ, and not the wine but the person engaged in the sacramental act of wine-drinking bears the blood of Christ.
At this juncture Hubmaier emphasized that the transformation that occurs at the Supper is ontological. Unlike his Reforming contemporaries, who referred to the church as the body of Christ in a symbolic sense, Hubmaier employed theologically precise linguistic handles, such as the noun Wesen (nature/essence) and the adjective wesentlich (essentially/substantially), to argue that an ontological shift follows the consumption of the respective elements.Footnote 41 Upon this consumption, the members of the visible church become the res, the physical body and blood of Christ, to which the signa of bread and wine were pointing.Footnote 42 Concerning the relationship between the external elements and Christ's human nature, of which the faithful internally partake, Hubmaier declared, “We maintain that the bread and wine of the Christ meal are outward word symbols of an inward Christian nature (inwendigen Christenlichen wesens) here on earth, in which…the body and blood of Christ is my body and blood.”Footnote 43 To make the nature of this identity explicit, Hubmaier went on to define the inwendige Christenliche wesen as the state where Christ's person “is essentially and bodily present” (mensch wesenlich vnnd leiblich ist).Footnote 44 In order to distance himself from the possible objection that the participants at the moment of reception, who share in Christ's human essence, could, like the Catholic host, be worshiped as divine,Footnote 45 Hubmaier again drew upon the distinction between the definitive and repletive presence of Christ's physical body. Only the definitive presence of Christ's body, which is in heaven and from which the repletive presence emanates, is for Hubmaier worthy of worship. However, the repletive presence, of which the sacramental presence in the Supper is a mode, is qualitatively lower and therefore not appropriately worshiped. To worship the repletive presence of Christ at all, much less in a believer, Hubmaier denounced as an “abominable idolatry,” which must be avoided “so that the Word of God will not thereby be blasphemed as a result of you.”Footnote 46 To further illustrate the difference between the definitive and repletive presence, Hubmaier used two biblical metaphors: the Johannine analogy of the vine and the branches and the Pauline analogy of the head and the remainder of Christ's body.Footnote 47
Pivotal to Hubmaier's conception of the real presence is his novel exegesis of the parable of the vine and the branches (John 15:1-8). Since this parable, in his reading, is spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper, Hubmaier averred that it discloses the meaning of what takes place as the faithful partake of the Eucharistic wine: “John 15: All these words, which Christ spoke at the Last Supper, indicate this…a pointer to the spiritual significance of the pouring out of the wine.”Footnote 48 The vine, which is the source of existence for the branches, alludes to Christ as he is definitively present in heaven.Footnote 49 The branches, which are distinct from the vine but still bear the physical nature of the vine, symbolize the sacramental mode of the repletive presence.Footnote 50 Hubmaier claimed that as churches collectively and believers individually drink the wine, they respectively become branches (which Christ “brings to life so that they begin to live, turn green, and bear fruit”Footnote 51) and the grapes on those branches.Footnote 52 Just as each particular grape and its corresponding branch possess the same physical nature as the vine itself but are distinct from the vine, Hubmaier reasoned, so each individual recipient and the church in general possess the physical nature of Christ in the Eucharist but are distinct from Christ himself.Footnote 53
Hubmaier supplemented this point by appealing to Paul's imagery of the church as a body, the head of which is Christ (1 Cor 10:14–17). Accordingly, Hubmaier posited that the head of the body, without which the remainder cannot live, represents the definitive presence of Christ's humanity at the right hand of God the Father, while the remainder of the body denotes the sacramental form of the repletive presence.Footnote 54 Hence believers share in the physical presence of the body of Christ, although the head of that body is in heaven. In the same way that he connected the parable of the vine and the branches with the sacramental wine, Hubmaier linked the metaphor of the body with the sacramental bread by appealing to 1 Cor 10:16–17: “And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.”Footnote 55 In his exegesis of this text, Hubmaier indicated that the loaf signifies the sacramental presence of the physical body of Christ in which the church participates:
One should always pay greater attention and render more seriousness to the things symbolized by the word symbols than to the symbols themselves…as we…remember by the bread how he, Christ, was our Christ, and how we…all are one bread and one body—we all, who have communion in one bread and…the communion of the body of Christ with us.Footnote 56
When the church consumes the one loaf, of which each member of the church eats a fragment, the unified church shares in the nature of the one physical body of Christ, in which each member comprises a unique “little kernel” (kernlin).Footnote 57 Since every body part and combination of parts (excluding the head) has the same nature as the head but is distinct from it, every believer and church share the same human nature as Christ but are distinct from him.Footnote 58
Hubmaier substantiated his doctrine of the real presence by appealing to the Pauline consequences of unworthily partaking of the Eucharist. He maintained that Paul referred to the bread as bread and the wine as wine both before and after their consecration in order to show that the consecration effected no change in the elements. But since unrepentant sinners who consume the bread and wine bear the physical body and blood of Christ (thereby literally abusing the human nature of Christ and provoking the divine wrath), Paul declared them guilty of the body and blood of Christ and accused them of failing to discern the fact that they were participating in the body of the Lord. As Hubmaier powerfully explained:
O dear pious Christians, the bread is not the body of Christ and the wine is not his blood, however, because we are the true body and blood of Christ…at the Supper of Christ, we shall be concerned…that the physical presence of Christ is not held with contempt or heedlessness, but rather with the utmost sincerity, devotion, and zeal according to the order of the institution of Christ. For truly, where we fail to differentiate the Supper of Christ from other eating and drinking, we eat and drink judgment upon ourselves, just as Paul harshly rebuked the Corinthians for the same offense.…Thus anyone who scorns or abuses the ceremonies of the new covenant scorns and abuses Christ himself.Footnote 59
Summing up the foregoing evidence, Hubmaier applied the dichotomy of definitive and repletive presence to the Johannine and Pauline analogies to craft a doctrine in which the faithful share the human nature of Christ in the Supper without being deified and without surrendering their own distinctive characters or natures. Insofar as each recipient, while partaking of the Eucharist, has both Christ's human nature and his or her own human nature simultaneously, Hubmaier's doctrine of the Eucharist is a literal consubstantiation (i.e., the possession of two natures at once), in which each recipient is consubstantiated into the humanity of Christ. Contra Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation, in which the Eucharistic elements are consubstantiated into Christ's humanity,Footnote 60 Hubmaier professed that believers in particular and the church in general are consubstantiated into Christ's body and blood as they partake of the bread and wine.
This discovery completes the trajectory begun by previous Hubmaier scholarship while doing so in a way that previous scholarship did not envision. By showing through detailed analysis of the primary source material that Hubmaier conceived of believers as consubstantial with Christ's physical body in the Lord's Supper, we have delineated a framework for understanding the logic of Hubmaier's Eucharistic thought. Such a framework is persuasive in possessing explanatory scope and power to straightforwardly account for all Hubmaier's statements on the Supper. This framework illustrates that the Eucharistic statements peppered throughout Hubmaier's work, which previous scholars found perplexing and so took figuratively, Hubmaier meant literally. Thus Rempel writes better than he knows in stating “Hubmaier's unfolding theology and his pastoral ministry convinced him that the ‘real presence’ in the Lord's Supper is that of the church as the body of Christ.”Footnote 61 But while Rempel and Mabry regard Hubmaier's use of “real presence” as simply metaphorical for believers’ ethical imitation of Christ because they lack evidence that Hubmaier could have regarded anything but the elements as bearing the real presence, our analysis provides precisely that evidence. Hubmaier's constructive exegesis of biblical images including the vine and branches, the church as body of Christ, and the church as the one bread proves that and discloses how Hubmaier regarded the human participants as literally bearing the real presence. However, this is not to minimize Hubmaier's Eucharistic ethics in any way, as the Reformer insisted that the consubstantiation of believers carried profound ramifications for how believers must live. To these ramifications we now turn.
Ethical Implications of the Lord's Supper
As a result of their bearing the real presence, the church in general and its members in particular assume a profound ethical responsibility in Hubmaier's conception of the Lord's Supper. Just as Hubmaier's communicatio furnished the basis for his doctrine of the real presence, so his conviction that libertarian free will (i.e., the freedom to choose between opposites in the spiritual and physical realms) constituted an inextinguishable facet of the imago Dei supplied the basis for the ethical dimension of his Eucharist. Alongside the Reformer's christological emphasis in the Supper, Rempel rightly points out that “Hubmaier had a second preoccupation, the human response to grace and the freedom of the will,”Footnote 62 a conviction that set him at odds with Luther and Zwingli. For unlike the Lutheran and Zwinglian doctrine of intrinsically efficacious grace wherein God's grace premoves the human will to perform spiritual good,Footnote 63 Hubmaier insisted that divine grace is extrinsically efficacious, such that grace empowers the person to perform spiritual good if she or he freely chooses to do so: “[God] does nothing without your consent so that your goodness would not be from compulsion but from your own free will.”Footnote 64 Because human nature is endowed with libertarian freedom, it is always possible for people, whether in an unregenerate or regenerate state, to accept and fruitfully use the grace given to them.
When applied to the Eucharist, Hubmaier's understanding of grace leads to a distinction between what we may call “potential grace” and “actual grace.” During the time that believers share in Christ's human nature, Christ grants them a measure or supply of grace that Hubmaier dubbed “die salbung Gottes” (the anointing of God),Footnote 65 conceived as a divine substance that cannot operate in and of itself.Footnote 66 Such potential grace is converted by recipients into actual grace when they choose to carry out works of charity toward God and neighbor. Upon this conversion, the actual grace supplies the faithful with the divine energy needed to carry out the works they choose to undertake.Footnote 67 Here we see that for Hubmaier, the Eucharistic elements exhibit, in addition to their christological symbolism, a deep ethical symbolism. Just as the physical food of bread and wine is transformed by the body into the energy necessary for physical life, so the spiritual food of potential grace dispensed through the vehicles of bread and wine is transformed by the soul into the energy necessary for spiritual life.Footnote 68 Hence we see that, contra previous Hubmaier scholarship, the Eucharist is not an ethical reality instead of a sacramental mediation of Christ's real presence and grace;Footnote 69 rather, it is an ethical reality because it is a sacramental mediation of Christ's real presence and grace.
This is why, in Hubmaier's assessment, reception of the Eucharist is necessary for living the Christian life and progressing toward sanctification. Humans can only bear the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper—for Hubmaier, Christ has provided no other means of bearing his sanctified human nature, the necessary vehicle for receiving the anointing (die salbung Gottes) that makes the Christian life possible. Consequently, no one wanting to live consistently as a disciple of Christ can avoid the Supper.Footnote 70 Expressing forcefully the indispensability of the Eucharist, Hubmaier wrote:
Now the person who does not want…to keep the Supper, he wants neither to believe in Christ nor to live out Christian love and does not want to be a Christian. The degree to which a person is concerned…about the suffering and death of Christ Jesus, about the shedding of his rose-colored blood, about the forgiveness of sins, about brotherly love and communion with God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, yes, the communion of the whole heavenly host and the universal Christian church outside of which there is no salvation, to precisely the same degree he should be concerned about the bread and the wine of God's table.Footnote 71
For this reason, the Eucharist assumed a preeminent place in the life of Hubmaier's churches in Waldshut (South Germany) and Nikolsburg (Moravia), practiced weekly on Sunday evenings as a separate service from the Sunday morning worship assembly. While the assembly was open to everyone who wished to attend regardless of religious convictions, the Supper was reserved only for baptized believers.Footnote 72
The strong ethical thrust in Hubmaier's Eucharist is exemplified by the liturgical details leading up to the reception of the elements. Indeed, Hubmaier subdivided his 1526 liturgy, Eine Form des Nachtmals Christi (A Form for the Supper of Christ), into two sections: the preparatory gathering, which centered around the liebepflicht (pledge of love), and the Supper itself.Footnote 73 The liturgy began with a call for brothers and sisters to gather around the Tisch Gottes (table of God), just as Jesus had arranged with his disciples for the Last Supper.Footnote 74 Hubmaier replaced the altar with a standard dinner table at which the faithful would partake of ordinary bread and individual cups of wine. An emphasis on the human disposition in the Supper finds pointed expression throughout the text. For example, the worshipers are exhorted not to chatter frivolously but rather call to mind and confess their sins: “But those who eat…should sit together in a disciplined manner without chattering and strife.…Everyone should start by accusing himself and confessing his sins and realizing his guilt before God.”Footnote 75 Afterwards Hubmaier, taking great care to ensure that the participants knew what they were doing, directed the celebrant to explain one of the Pauline or Johannine Eucharistic passages.Footnote 76 The result of this explication should be the stirring up of the hearts of those gathered around the table to a response of devotion, love, and gratitude to Christ: “Now the pastor must be diligent to fully proclaim the death of the Lord, in order for the people to envision the infinite goodness of Christ, and the church may be taught, edified, and directed in heartfelt fervent and brotherly love.”Footnote 77
At this point, Hubmaier ordered the pastor to read and amplify Paul's warning in 1 Corinthians 11 for believers not to eat or drink damnation on themselves. Such an amplification consisted in admonishing the congregation to examine their souls individually as to whether they had an inner hunger and thirst for the bread that comes from heaven, due to the Johannine demand that the heavenly bread and wine be consumed in spirit, faith, and truth: “Let a person search himself to see whether he has a true inner and fervent hunger for the bread that comes down from heaven, from which one truly lives, and thirst for the drink that springs up into eternal life, to both eat and drink in the spirit, faith, and truth, as Christ instructs us in John 4, 6, and 7.”Footnote 78 Here Hubmaier's appeal to and reinterpretation of John 6 are remarkable, since John 6 was a classic proof-text used by Catholic polemicists to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation and was thus avoided altogether by Luther and Zwingli in their doctrines of the Eucharist.Footnote 79 In Hubmaier's exegesis of John 6, as suggested by the previous quote, the bread and wine, while not transformed into the body and blood of Christ, are still considered the “bread that comes down from heaven” and the “drink that springs up into eternal life.” This is because they are the channels through which Christ mediates his “potential” grace to believers: “It is not that this bread and wine are anything other than bread and wine,” although they effect “the significant mysteries…for the sake of which Christ therefore instituted [the Eucharist].”Footnote 80 Due to the supreme importance of partaking in a worthy fashion, Hubmaier closed the preparatory gathering with the pledge of love, which he insisted must be avowed by each participant as a prerequisite for Eucharistic reception.
In order to ensure that human acts of commitment to Christ were carried out in response to the grace received at the Supper, Hubmaier required its recipients to take the liebepflicht. This lengthy and comprehensive pledge constituted an ethical summons to imitate Jesus's surpassing act of self-giving by loving brother and sister and, if necessary, disciplining them. The text of the pledge reads as follows:
Brothers and sisters, if you desire to love God before, in, and beyond all things, to serve him only through the power of his sacred and living Word, to reverence and pray to him and follow his name forever, to submit your fleshly and sinful will to his divine will which he has wrought in you by his living Word, both in life and in death, then let each one say individually: I WILL.
If you desire to love your neighbor and serve him with works of brotherly love, to lay down your life and shed your blood for him, to obey father, mother, and all civic authorities according to God's will, doing all these things in the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, who laid down his flesh and shed his blood for us, then let each one say individually: I WILL.
If you desire to carry out fraternal admonition among your brothers and sisters, to bring peace and unity between them, and to reconcile yourselves to everyone you have wronged, to forsake all jealousy, hatred, and ill will toward everyone, to voluntarily desist from any deed or behavior that brings harm, difficulty, or offense to your neighbor, to love your enemies as well and do good to them, and to exclude according to the Rule of Christ, Matthew 18, anyone who refuses to do so, then let each one say individually: I WILL.
If you desire to confirm publicly before the church this pledge of love (liebe-pflicht) that you have just made, through the Supper of Christ, by eating bread and drinking wine, and to bear witness to it in the power of the living memorial of the passion and death of Jesus Christ our Lord, then let each one say individually: I DESIRE IT IN THE POWER OF GOD.Footnote 81
Such a pledge demands that the faithful conform to Christ, the head of the church, and to be, as he was, a person who lives for others. Hubmaier reasoned that if believers vowed to appropriate the divine grace bestowed in the Eucharist by living a life of love, then unbelievers could assess their own deeds against the standard of how believers lived. Since their lives formed the book that the world read, believers were obliged to discipline each other in love.Footnote 82
It should be noted, furthermore, that the liebepflicht presupposes a theory of the atonement in which Christians are accordingly made to be willing and able to act as Jesus acted. Hubmaier made this point explicit:
Just as the body and blood of Christ became my body and blood on the cross, in the same way my body and blood must become the body and blood of my neighbor, and his must become my body and blood during my time of need, or we cannot profess to be Christians at all. This is the will of Christ in the Supper.Footnote 83
Christ's will can be so identified, insisted Hubmaier, since sacraments signify both an event in the divine life and an event in human life. Along with the divine sacramental presence, Hubmaier contended that the Eucharist signifies sanctified human nature, or a continuation of the earthly life of the second person of the Trinity, as the believer who bears that life is literally brought into the physical body of Christ.Footnote 84
Consequently, the believer who realizes the transformation that transpires and the “potential” grace given in the Eucharist will submit his or her will wholly to Christ, which may lead to death: “He will submit himself to Christ's will, namely, that we must do for our neighbors the same thing that he has done for us and lay down our bodies, lives, properties, and blood for their sake.”Footnote 85 However, Hubmaier acknowledged that humans could not so live in their own strength; therefore, the “potential” grace given by God in the Eucharist, without which grace believers stand powerless to actualize the divine will, is imperative for Nachfolge Christi (discipleship of Christ).Footnote 86 For this reason, it is vital for the believer through the channel of the Eucharist to approach “God diligently for grace and strength, so that he might impart them to us and thus enable us to perform his will. For if he does not impart grace to us, we are lost already, since we are human, we were human, and we will be human until death.”Footnote 87 In Hubmaier's thought, then, the Lord's Supper proves to be the mediator of the supreme sacramental and ethical reality to an otherwise helpless humanity.
While Hubmaier denounced as blasphemous the Catholic notion that Christ is literally sacrificed by the priest celebrating the Eucharist,Footnote 88 the Reformer affirmed that Christ's body is figuratively sacrificed in a new way. It should be pointed out that, for Hubmaier, the time period in which believers bear the real presence of Christ starts when they partake of the elements and ends at the close of the Supper service.Footnote 89 However, salbung Gottes, or the measure of “potential grace” that Christ mediates, continues with the believer for an indefinite period of time following the Supper.Footnote 90 With this in mind, Hubmaier exhorted the faithful upon their dismissal from the Eucharist, “Arise and depart in the peace of Christ Jesus.…Make sure that you bear fruit worthy of…the Supper of Christ, so that you, in the power of God, satisfy your vow, pledge, and sacrament.”Footnote 91 Moreover, it was certainly possible for those baptized believers who became sharers in the physical body of Christ at the Supper to be sacrificed in martyrdom for their radical version of Christian faith.Footnote 92 Such was an experience Hubmaier knew all too well. In December 1525 Hubmaier was forced to flee Waldshut when the Austrian imperial government captured the city; upon arriving at Zurich, he suffered prison and torture at the hands of Zwingli from December 1525 to April 1526. Afterwards, Hubmaier faced the impending threat of Austrian King Ferdinand I during his ministry at Nikolsburg.Footnote 93 Thus, insofar as those who are the body of Christ in the Eucharist are martyred, Christ is figuratively sacrificed not in, but as a result of, the Eucharist:
Because we now, as a result of eating the bread and drinking the wine in memory of the passion and shed blood of our Lord Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins…have all become one loaf and one body, and our Head is Christ, we ought to fully conform ourselves to our Head…by each of us offering his own flesh and blood.Footnote 94
In this reconceptualization of the Eucharistic sacrifice as the self-offering of the worshiping community empowered by the sacramental meal, Hubmaier maintained that Christ's sacrifice for humanity becomes the transforming power of history when those who appropriate it for themselves imitate its sacrifice.Footnote 95 Here we perceive that an evangelistic thrust underlies Hubmaier's doctrine of the Supper: as believers figuratively become Christ to others, nonbelievers will be attracted to the Reformer's radical form of Christianity, enter the church through believers’ baptism, and ultimately come into ontological communion with Christ in the Eucharist.Footnote 96 The sacraments thus enable God the Son to be salvifically at work in the church. For these reasons, Hubmaier claimed that if all one had of Christianity were a right understanding of its sacraments, one would possess all things spiritual: “Now if we possessed no other word or Scripture, but only possessed an accurate understanding of water baptism and the Supper of Christ, we would possess God and all his creatures, faith and love, the law and all the prophets.”Footnote 97 Specifically with regard to the Eucharist, the church can only operate through the grace dispensed through its celebration; therefore, Rempel declares, “In its role as the embodiment of the church's outward life, the Lord's Supper is the sine qua non of the church.”Footnote 98
Further, the grace received in the Supper enables the perpetuation throughout history of the power that the incarnate Christ exhibited and the kingdom that he instituted:
From this fact it follows and becomes transparently obvious that the Supper…does not transpire out of human powers or abilities, since that would be conceitedness or human pride. Instead, it transpires…in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, in the grace and power of God. Therefore, it is a power.…Through it the believer can live according to the Word and command of Christ from that point forward. However, he must not attempt this out of human ability, in order that what happened to Peter will not happen to him, since Christ states that “apart from me you can do nothing, and you can do nothing without the power of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” At this point the person breaks out in speech and action, proclaiming the name and exalting the worship of Christ, in order that others will be healed and saved through us, just as we previously came to faith through people who proclaimed Christ to us, causing the kingdom of Christ to be enlarged.Footnote 99
This quote encapsulates the inextricable interrelationship in Hubmaier's thought between the power of God made possible by the Eucharist, the performance of good works, and the advancement of the gospel. In sum, the Eucharist, whose worthy consumption is made possible by the Christian's right relationship with God, encompasses three historical points of reference. It points backward to the suffering of Christ, to the present in the sharing of Christ's Wesen by the church, and forward to the righteous living, evangelism, and possible suffering of Christ's people. For Hubmaier, the Lord's Supper is thus the sign that the incarnation is being carried on in the church.Footnote 100
The distinctiveness of Hubmaier's Eucharist is sharpened by comparison to the two Eucharistic models containing similar features to it—namely, the models of Zwingli and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt. While Zwingli's sacramentarianism plainly contradicts Hubmaier's praesentia realis, Zwingli argued that the Eucharist should accomplish the same ethical goals that Hubmaier advocated. Both Hubmaier and Zwingli would have affirmed the concept that, through Christ's presence in the congregation, Christ gives believers grace, which prompts believers to participate in a thankful, ethically fruitful response to that grace. However, this would be verbal agreement only, masking the fact that Hubmaier and Zwingli held quite different definitions of Christ's presence and grace. By Christ's presence in the congregation, Hubmaier meant that during the Supper the congregation as a whole and each individual member therein are consubstantiated into the physical body of Christ, simultaneously possessing Christ's sanctified human nature and their own human natures. He did not mean, as Zwingli did, that Christ is present only via his omnipresent divine spirit during the Supper while his physical body remains at God the Father's right hand.Footnote 101 Likewise, by grace Hubmaier denoted a divine substance that empowers the soul, analogous to the physical substances of wine and oil that empower the body. By contrast, Zwingli denounced as “popish” the concept of grace as substance and defined grace as personal assurance of God's unmerited favor toward the sinner.Footnote 102 Drawing these observations together, Hubmaier believed that in the Supper the physically present Christ enables humans to temporarily possess his physicality, during which time their souls are filled with an empowering substance, while Zwingli believed that in the Supper the spiritually present Christ freshly impresses upon the souls of the recipients the datum that they possess God's unmerited favor.Footnote 103 For Hubmaier, the empowering substance of grace leads believers to engage in ethical behavior, while for Zwingli, the conviction of God's unmerited favor leads believers to act morally.
Like Zwingli's model, Karlstadt's model of the Eucharist bears a seeming similarity to Hubmaier's model, which, upon closer examination, leads to an even sharper difference. Both Hubmaier and Karlstadt would have assented to the statement that, in the Supper, the “this” (hoc or touto) in the words of institution refers not to the bread but somehow back to Christ himself. But again, this would be verbal agreement only, masking dissimilarity in content. For Hubmaier, Jesus uttered the formula “This is my body” upon the disciples’ consumption of the bread to indicate that the disciples themselves were literally his body, possessing his human nature alongside their own. So the “this” refers directly to the disciples and only derivatively back to Jesus, as the disciples shared Jesus's nature. However, for Karlstadt, the way the “this” refers back to Christ is directly. On Karlstadt's reading, when Jesus said “This is my body,” it was before the disciples had consumed the bread.Footnote 104 Hence Jesus, when distributing the bread, pointed to himself and uttered “This is my body” to indicate that his own flesh constituted his body rather than the bread. Because this view seemed anachronistic (i.e., Jesus's trying to prevent a sacramental misinterpretation that had not yet occurred) and tautologous (i.e., Jesus's claiming that his body was his body), it was famously rejected by Luther and MelanchthonFootnote 105 and explicitly rejected by Hubmaier himself.Footnote 106
Concluding Reflections
Through an integration of his Johannine Christology with his Pauline ecclesiology, Hubmaier constructed a radically new doctrine of the Eucharist. In this quite philosophically realist doctrine, the church is the extension of the incarnation, collectively and individually. When believers partake of the Lord's Supper, they ontologically share in the human nature or essence (Wesen) of Christ without sacrificing their own human natures. Such a consubstantiation of the faithful seems to be grounded in Hubmaier's reinterpretation of the medieval principle, common in early modern popular and scholarly thought, that a sacrament is an analogue of the incarnation.Footnote 107 Stemming from the Seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (787), the notion arose in medieval sacramentology that since God had revealed himself in flesh, any material thing consecrated for that purpose could be the instrumental cause for the mediation of spirit.Footnote 108 However, Hubmaier employed similar argumentation to suggest that the material objects of bread and wine are the instrumental cause not of the mediation of Christ's spirit, but of Christ's repletively present humanity. Hence the Supper proves for Hubmaier not only to be the primal meeting point between God the Son and the church, but a medium and expansion of the incarnation itself. Echoing a characteristic theme of Bernard of Clairvaux, Hubmaier regarded the Eucharist as the event in which humanity is made (just as during Christ's earthly life) into a means of divine self-disclosure, thereby acquiring a foretaste of its final redemption at the general resurrection at the end of the age.Footnote 109 As a result, such a radically anthropocentric Eucharist became for Hubmaier the surpassing symbol of Christian discipleship.
The central difference between Hubmaier's doctrine of the real presence and that of his contemporaries can be summarized as follows: neither early modern Catholicism nor Luther would, per Hubmaier, have dared identify the bearers of the real presence as the human recipients of the Eucharist themselves. Nor, for that matter, would Hubmaier's patristic or medieval forebears have proposed such a human identification. Hence our discovery that Hubmaier proposed the consubstantiation of believers with the physical body of Christ represents a significant advance in Hubmaier scholarship. This discovery indicates that while various lines of theology provided Hubmaier with the necessary springboard for his thought, he was essentially an independent thinker and, as such, he formulated a Eucharistic doctrine that was truly his own.Footnote 110
