This is my body — they disagree

The Marburg failure sends ripples through the entire Reformation that are still being felt.

The question of the Lord's Supper is not peripheral to the Reformation — it is central. The medieval Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation had been one of Luther's primary targets in the Babylonian Captivity. But in attacking transubstantiation Luther had not specified what he believed positively, and when he does specify it — real bodily presence in, with, and under the bread and wine, without the Aristotelian explanation — Zwingli finds it philosophically absurd and theologically wrong.

Calvin, who will come later, finds a middle way: Christ is spiritually but truly present, not physically but not merely symbolically either. The Calvinist position on the Eucharist is more nuanced than either Luther's or Zwingli's but satisfies neither.

The result is that the Protestant tradition enters the world fragmented on the question of what happens at the table — the most basic act of Christian community, the one thing Christ explicitly said to do in remembrance of him.

Lutherans and Reformed cannot commune together. Different traditions build their table theologies and their table practices around their answers to questions that the Marburg Colloquy could not resolve.

This is not simply a theological tragedy. It is a pastoral one. Every Sunday across the Protestant world, people who confess the same Lord and the same gospel cannot eat together because of how they understand the meal.

Christ said do this. He did not specify that doing it would divide the people doing it.

Jesus said do this in remembrance of me. He said it to a room of people who were about to betray him, deny him, and flee. He did not say do this only when you have resolved the theological questions about what it means.

The Protestant divisions over the Eucharist are a permanent reminder that even the most earnest pursuit of biblical truth can produce fractures that the truth itself does not require.

Some of those fractures are necessary — there are genuine differences that cannot be papered over without dishonesty. But some are the product of pride, stubbornness, and the confusion of secondary questions with primary ones.

What does your practice at the table say about what you believe about the one who instituted it? And what would it mean to come to the table with enough humility to receive what is there, regardless of the unresolved questions?