Johannine Studies
III. JOHANNINE CHRISTOLOGY DURING THE REFORMATION

Subjects reviewed in this chapter:
Overview – Martin Luther – Huldrich Zwsingli and the Eucharistic Controversy – John Calvin – Conclusion

Johannine Christology during the period of the Reformation in the sixteenth century is obviously tied to the polemical character of religious discourse of the time. No reformer, with the possible exception of John Calvin, approached the Gospel of John the way a modern exegete would with higher and lower critical concerns. To be sure, there were several separate theological treatises, of varying type and quality, which were written by important reformers during the sixteenth century. Yet each of these was hewn out of the hardbed of controversy. In addition to earlier sermons, Martin Luther preached a series of sermons on John’s Gospel during the 1530s. Huldrich Zwingli had previously dealt with the Gospel of John in both sermons and exegetical works as early as 1524-25. Martin Bucer published a commentary on John after the Berne disputation in 1528 which was later revised. Johannes Oecolampadius wrote Annotations on the Gospel of John in 1533. Heinrich Bullinger wrote a commentary on John's Gospel in 1543. Philip Melanchthon wrote an exposition on John during the Lutheran reformation, and not a few Anabaptists, including Menno Simons, penned treatises on certain topics which indirectly reflected their understanding of Johannine Christology. Second and third generation reformers also wrote exegetical works on the Gospel of John; Calvin’s commentary appeared in 1553, and Faustus Socinus wrote an Explanation of the Prologue of the Gospel of John before he died in 1604.

Thus the perimeters of our study are the polemical sermons that Luther delivered in the absence of the parish pastor in Wittenberg, Johannes Bugenhagen, beginning in 1530, and the anti-trinitarian controversy which surrounded the life and career of Socinus at the close of the sixteenth century in Poland. It will be necessary, of course, to delve into earlier manifestations of Johannine Christology as they become important to focalize certain theological developments. Initially, however, it should be instructive to see the larger picture of the Reformation and its corollary theological development, especially as it came to relate to the Christological emphases adumbrated by key theologians.

Overview
Roman Catholic remonstrance following Luther’s break with the Church of Rome clearly tried to discredit his orthodoxy, rooting his heretical tendencies in his doctrine of Jesus Christ. These were unsuccessful because Luther was clearly in the mainstream of orthodox thought. He believed that his view of Christ reflected the views of the ancient ecumenical councils and their respective creedal formulas, particularly the councils of Nicea and Chalcedon. He never tired of making this clear, and his writings were replete with citations and references to the church’s ancient creeds. Actually, Luther’s Christology was based on his theology of the cross, for without a Christ who was both divine and human, a Christ who was one with the Father, Luther’s understanding of salvation would have made little sense. And, he did not understand that he was developing any new doctrine; the doctrine implicit in the theology of the cross was time-honored. It was the doctrine one could read in the Gospels, in Paul, in the fathers of the church, such as Augustine, and it was the doctrine that had been established and worked out through the painful vicissitudes of theological controversy during the first four centuries of Christian history.

What brought Christological issues to light during the Reformation was actually the controversy over the Lord’s Supper. Jaroslav Pelikan is convinced that this controversy precipitated more Christological discussion than any other since the days of the early church.¹ The controversy was polarized between Lutheran and Zwinglian groups, the former advocating a real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the eucharist, while the latter viewed Christ’s presence as more symbolic and sacramental. Each group claimed adherence to Nicea and Chalcedon, and both groups labeled the other as violator of those principles. Luther called Zwingli “neo-Nestorian.” Calvin saw it as inevitable that Luther’s view which emphasized that Christ’s body was “swallowed up by his divinity” would reduce to a type of “Eutychian” position which had been condemned at Chalcedon.²

Etched out in the controversy with Zwingli and Oecolampadius, Luther extrapolated from the orthodox doctrine of the communicatio idiomatvm. Succinctly put, this doctrine maintained that what could be said of one nature of Christ’s person could be said of the other nature. Thus Luther believed that the omnipresence of Christ’s divine nature could be ascribed to his entire glorified person, both human and divine. Already in his earthly life and certainly after his glorification the body of Christ was in heaven and on earth at the same time. Thus the phrase, “the right hand of God” was not a place but “the almighty power of God, which at one and the same time can be nowhere and yet must be everywhere.”³ Luther did not see himself basing his belief about Christ’s statement. “This is my body,” on any kind of rationalistic argument but on the word and promise of Christ. The proper relation of Christ’s human and divine natures formed the basis of his doctrine of salvation. Christ took upon Himself our humanity to take away the law and its curse, suffering death for us, but because He was God or divine, the power of death could not hold sway over Him. Thus the communicatio idiomatum was at the heart of Luther’s theology of the cross.⁴

The sacramental controversy focused on the interpretation of John 6 and Christ’s words, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you,” and “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.” Huldrich Zwingli, whose liturgy for the Lord’s Supper included John 6:47-63, put these two verses together. Most of the reformers agreed that what was being spoken of here in John was faith in Christ. But Luther did not understand the chapter to have anything to do with the Lord’s Supper. Bullinger, however, saw matters differently, and Calvin, though more cautious, did use John 6 to explain that the “eating” in the Lord’s Supper was something other than “the physical eating by which these crude theologians dream of feeding themselves.”⁵ Both sides claimed to have Augustine as corroboration of their position.

The opponents of the Anabaptists believed that their biblical hermeneutic would inevitably lead to a denunciation of the early Christian creeds. When Balthasar Hubmaier was faced with such calumnies, he referred to “the confession of the foundation of the universal Christian church” by which he doubtless meant the Nicene and Chalcedonian confessions, and Dirk Philipsz even taught the doctrine of the “filioque.” Menno Simons could propound an orthodox summary of the doctrines of the person and work of Christ, and “he opposed Zwinglian Christology on the grounds that it taught ‘two sons in Christ,’ in some Nestorian fashion.”⁶ Menno taught that Christ had not taken his flesh from Abraham’s seed, nor of Mary’s womb, but became human within her womb. Hans Denck gave to one of the chapters of a doctrinal statement the title, “On the Trinity, the Unity, and the Single Threeness of God,” but then said nothing about the trinity in the chapter itself.⁷

Luther and Calvin had professed adherence to orthodox dogmas of the trinity and the person of Christ as formulated by Nicea and Chalcedon. Luther transposed the creeds into an exposition on the saving work of Christ and justification of the believer now from the historic treatment of the relation of the Father and the Son. In his interest in the real presence of the Lord’s Supper, he elaborated a doctrine of the relationship between the two natures of Christ which matched or exceeded in metaphysical complexity the ancient Alexandrian theology. Calvin had denounced this theology as a denial of the principle of sola scriptura, but Calvin had documented from Biblical sources the Nicean dogma more than anyone since patristic times. Both Luther and Calvin disliked the technical language of the early creeds – Luther hated the term homoousios and Calvin wanted to see it “buried” – but their conformity to its intent as well as content was unassailable.⁸

Yet the Catholic suspicion of where sola scriptura would lead did, in fact, begin to show itself in the views of Michael Servetus and George Blandrata, and later in Fausto Socinus and the Racovian Catechism of 1605. Against such views, Bullinger warned that it was not enough to declare loyalty to the sole authority of scripture, for one was obliged as well to set forth an interpretation of scripture which was simultaneously “native” to the text and “congruous with the articles of the faith.” Calvin complained that such views were ignorant of the patristic tradition; but Servetus claimed to be defending “the older traditions of the apostles” and of the earliest church fathers against the later tradition of Nicea, while Socinus complained that the prologue of John's Gospel “has, as far as I know, never until now been correctly expounded by anyone.”⁹

Because Anselm’s satisfaction theory presupposed, it was thought, the orthodox Chalcedonian dogma of the person of Christ as the God-man, it came to be viewed in the west as the necessary corollary to Chalcedon. Socinus refuted Anselm’s theory which he said detracted from “the power and authority, or at any rate from the goodness and mercy of God.” Christ was not the “price for our sins” nor did He “placate” the wrath of God. Rather, He “showed and taught the way of salvation,” and also “declared” the love of God and “confirmed” it by miracles and His death and resurrection. Thus there was no need for “satisfaction” and no opposition between the justice and mercy of God.¹⁰

Thus Socinus did not believe in the necessity of seeing Christ as the “Son of God” in the sense that it had been understood in orthodox dogma. Such a phrase was but an appellation and resulted in not a trinitarianism but a tritheism. Servetus said that not one word about “essence,” “person” or homoousios was to be found in the Bible and in this he was joined by Socinus. In their Biblical arsenal, the unitarians had to view, for example, Philippians 2:5-11 as a passage of adoption: not a “nature” which Christ had but a “power” given to Him. He remained subordinate to the Father but He received from the Father “an equality of power” with Him. Eventually Christ would surrender this back to the Father. Of course the prologue of John’s Gospel was crucial and Socinus devoted a special treatise to this one chapter in his Explanation of the Prologue of the Gospel of John. Servetus had identified the Logos as Jesus the human being. So also had Socinus, arguing that the title “the Word” did not refer to His ontological nature but to His office as one who “expounded the evangelical word of his Father.” Nothing in the sacred text could be used to contradict the absolute monotheism of the shema. One need not take Christ’s words, “I and the Father are one,” to be a metaphysical reference, but rather oneness of mind and purpose. So. Servetus believed that the traditional exegesis could use a bit of changing, for “if you take it as your starting point that Christ is the one toward whom all passages of Scripture tend, then everything will be easy,” an obvious reference to Luther’s kind of Biblical hermeneutic in dealing with the Old Testament.¹¹

But there were troublesome passages for the unitarians. John 3:13 (“No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man who is in heaven”) was viewed as a “trope” by Socinus, but his discussion of the verse was even more suspect: “Christ, after he was born as a man but before he began to undertake the task imposed on him by God his Father, was in heaven, through the plan and action of God, and remained there for some time in order to hear from God himself.” The introductory formula of the Lord’s Prayer was not intended to indicate who should be worshipped, for when Christ is worshipped so is the Father to whom Christ was subordinate. Thus, regarding Philippians 2, the worship addressed to Christ is to take place “to the glory of God the Father.” Because the authority of Christ had been “given” to Him by the Father it necessarily followed that .the Son of God, who is Christ, is not “eternal” and yet at the same time that “he is to be worshipped.” It was therefore possible “to worship Christ for no other reason than that it is obligatory to worship the Father.”¹²

Christological expositions, taken only in part from Johannine texts, thus were presented in the sixteenth century within the heated battles of controversy. Nevertheless, it is possible to earmark several key areas of productivity which were to have lasting effect within Protestantism. These areas would be the seminal thought of Luther, and particularly his sermons on the Gospel of John beginning in 1530, the controversy over the eucharist between Luther and Zwingli and how it helped to shape Zwingli’s Christology, and Calvin’s commentary on John in 1553.

Martin Luther
Luther’s exegesis had both continuity and discontinuity with the medieval tradition, the latter demonstrated in the novelty he brought to the exegetical task which culminated in his theology of the cross. It is possible that Luther's first sermon may have been based on the Gospel of John, a Christmas sermon in Latin preached to fellow Augustinian monks in 1514.¹³ Luther loved John’s Gospel; his favoritism for John over the Synoptics was due to its concentration on the discourses of the Lord rather than on his miracles.

Luther’s German Mass of 1526 had prescribed that the Gospel of John be the basis of Saturday sermons. It was these Saturday sermons which he delivered in the absence of the parish pastor of Wittenberg, Johannes Bugenhagen. The sermons on John 1-4 cover a period of more than three years, beginning in the summer of 1537. During this time, Luther was embroiled in theological conflict and saddled with poor physical and emotional health. He had already preached Saturday sermons on John 6-8 which he had begun in 1530, and at that time his health was bothering him and he was besieged with extra projects and duties. He was ready for Bugenhagen’s return even then. Nevertheless, he continued preaching on John during Bugenhagen’s protracted absence.¹⁴

Luther was convinced that the Gospel of John taught the doctrine of the trinity as three distinct persons dwelling in a single essence. The Father begot the Son from eternity and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Father bestowed his “entire divine nature” upon the Son, making him “one together with Him.”¹⁵ Luther also was confident that John wrote his Gospel, at least in part, as an answer to the views of Cerinthus. The Word is God, existed before creation, and is totally different from any human word. As God’s Word, Christ is a “conversation” God had with Himself within His paternal heart. But no one was aware of this until the Word was made flesh.¹⁶ This Word or conversation God has with Himself is as complete and perfect as God Himself, yet because He is so absorbed in His Word, “He pays no attention to anything else.” The Word of God thus became the creator of creation. The Word or Speech of God already was, before the creation of the world, more sublime than anything created or made. Certainly this cannot be known by human reason.¹⁷

Yet is was clear to Luther that the Word and the Father were distinct, for Christ as the Word was “entirely separate from the Father.” Although they were two, the Son remains “the one true God with the Father.” The Father speaks, the Son is the spoken. The Word was born of the Father alone. Christ was of the essence or substance of the Father (hupostasis), and after His birth from the virgin Mary, He was not only true God but also true man. The Word thus created all things, although Luther called Him “co-creator with the Father,” for the Father created all things through the Son.¹⁸

Throughout Luther’s treatment of Johannine Christology in these sermons, it is clear that he was dealing with an article of faith which must be accepted by the Christian without the test of reason. As we would expect, Luther often applauded the irrational because it flew in the face of human reason and confidence. Christ is the source of offense, “the target of every attack,” yet it is He who will have the last word. Luther was certainly fond of using Paul’s sense of paradox that the foolish things to human eyes are the very things God has chosen to use in His historic deeds of salvation. In this world the struggle between Christ and the devil will never cease.¹⁹

Luther’s remarks in the sermons were carefully aimed at heterodox theologians who had challenged the orthodox and catholic position with new-fangled teaching. It is in this context that Arianism becomes the target of rebuke from Luther’s invective preaching. It was Arius who taught that Christ was created, thereby calling into question His divinity. There were others, such as Kasper Schwenkfeld, who denied that Christ had a humanity akin to ours. But Christ had to be true God and true man; if He were not truly God, what would His death mean for us? “No, we must have a Savior who is true God and Lord over sin, death, devil and hell. If we permit the devil to topple this stronghold for us, so that we disbelieve His divinity, then his suffering, death, and resurrection profit us nothing.”²⁰

The Manicheans also got their due from the Wittenberg pulpit. They denied that God could take human form. Luther, however, affirmed that Christ was a “natural man” and assumed human form “from the blood of a woman,” “as any other child does from its mother.” Christ received everything that a child normally and naturally receives from its mother, except sin. It was the divinity within this humanity which was the “hook concealed under the earthworm” to defeat Satan; Satan swallowed it when Christ died and was buried. With imagery such as this borrowed from the church fathers, especially Augustine, Luther proclaimed that of all the Gospel writers, John was pre-eminent among the apostles “in his powerful portrayal of the deity of Christ the Lord.”²¹

The creator Word also continues to preserve creation. “Thus, as we human beings did not create ourselves, so we can do nothing at all to keep ourselves alive for a single moment by our own power.”²² The Son of God draws so close to humanity that He becomes our light. All human, cultural achievements are derived from this light. There is also the light that God grants only to His own, the elect. The light of the world was, of course, Christ, the Word of God. It shone from the beginning of the world, before the flood through Adam, then through the Hebrew patriarchs. Luther speaks of the woman’s seed bruising the head of the serpent strictly in Christological terms. Later, the light shone in the prophets of Israel until finally the light of the Lord shone in Christ. “He lit the brightest torch, which shone with unprecedented brilliance.” His apostles carried forward the torch, but again scholars, lords and sages despised the light, “considered it fables, fairy tales, folly and lies of the devil.” And, in Luther’s day, the papacy and its backers try to keep the light in darkness. The world refuses to see this light, still it shines for the sake of the little flock which is to be illumined by it.²³

As the Gospel writer introduces the Baptist who bore witness to Christ, Luther takes the opportunity to chastise Francis, Dominic, and others for bearing witness to themselves and a certain ascetic life-style. He also had words for Anabaptists who deride the written and spoken word in favor of the impartation of the Holy Spirit in some direct way. John the Baptist’s oral testimony was necessary to bear witness to the Word of God; external, empirical witness was, in fact, necessary.

Luther used John 1:14 as the occasion to champion Bernard’s notion that the incarnation was the stumbling-block that brought the downfall of Lucifer. “God’s assumption of human nature and the union of God and man in the person of Christ is comparable to placing a filthy sow at table and chasing away holy and pious people.”²⁴ The devil vanishes when the words, “And the Word became flesh” are uttered. But if faith is lacking there is no power in these words. The mere pronunciation of them brings no magical power. Luther also impugned the views of the Apollinarists who asserted that Christ adopted a human body, but not a human soul. “They were stupid asses,” thought Luther, for “flesh” clearly embraces body and soul. Christ therefore took on human flesh “which was mortal and subject to the terrible judgment of God because of the sins of the human race.”²⁵ Like the Manicheans, they reduce Christ to a ghost or phantom.

We become sons and daughters of God by adoption whereas Christ was the Son of God by nature, the one and only “begotten Son.” No one is like Christ by nature. Adam was not full of grace, but Christ had the grace of God by nature. His words are true. His life was a life of service to humankind. The Synoptics flesh out the details of His life which John narrates only briefly. Luther thought that during His whole life, Christ was consumed with sorrow which prevented Him from ever being happy: “And if He had not been crucified, He would have grieved Himself to death over the utter futility of all His efforts with the Jewish people.”²⁶

Luther used the text of John 3:13 (“No one has ascended into heaven . . . “) to affirm again his traditional ideas about the trinity and the two distinct natures of Christ in the one Son of God; “that God has no other Son than the one born of the Virgin Mary, and that the Son, begotten by the Father before the beginning of the world, lies in the lap of Mother Mary.”²⁷ Against Nestorius, Mary is the mother of God, and Luther consistently supported the orthodox decrees of the early ecumenical councils of the church. “But if we differentiate two sons in Christ, then it must follow that there are also two persons; this would nullify our redemption and the forgiveness of sin. No, the two natures must be the one Christ. Otherwise no satisfaction could have been rendered for our sins, and nothing would come of our salvation. If Christ were only man, His suffering would have been useless; for no man’s suffering has ever been able to overcome my sin and yours, death and the power of the devil, God’s wrath and eternal damnation. Therefore it was necessary for Him to be God, in order to suffer, also true man.”²⁸

The Father and Mary both had the same Son, the former from eternity and Mary in time. The two natures are separated but there is only one Son. When Christ was born of the virgin Mary, He descended from heaven, “but at the same time remained in heaven.” He also ascended into heaven, “but was also in heaven before his ascension.” But reason cannot fathom any of this doctrine: “How all this comes to pass, I admit I do not understand.”²⁹ It was an article of faith and reason only gets us lost trying to understand it.

What we attribute to one nature is thus ascribed to the other nature “by virtue of the personal union in Christ.” We often differentiate between the two natures, as we might differentiate between the body and soul, yet “we mean to apply to the whole person.” “Oh, dear Lord, You are wandering around on this earth, hanging on the cross, suffering and dying. But how can I make these statements harmonize: that You descended from heaven and ascended again into heaven, that you remain in heaven, and that before this You were in heaven continuously? Can the Son of Man be on earth and the Son of God in heaven? You must answer thus: Our Christian faith makes this harmonize, and so does this text, in which Christ Himself declares: ‘As the Son of Man I walk on this earth. I perform My office here; I suffer and die. And although I was born man, I am simultaneously God’s Son in heaven. I do not forfeit My divine nature, but I remain in heaven.’”³⁰

The author of the Gospel of John always links the two natures of deity and humanity together. The attributes of both natures are ascribed and imputed to the whole person of Christ “in the concrete,” creating a “communion of properties.” One dare not separate the two natures, or divide the one person, therefore, but acknowledge that as John distinguishes between the persons of the Godhead, the Father and Son remain true God.³¹

As we have already indicated, Christ’s sermon on “I am the Bread of Life” in John 6 became the hub of debate among Protestants. Luther admitted that there was surely bread and wine on the altar, but that Christ was also present in the supper. Luther did not believe that this chapter in John indicated any basis for a eucharistic theology, but because the Zwinglians treated it so, he was willing to enter the fray and give his own imput. He accused Zwingli of dividing Christ, making only the divinity capable of imparting eternal life. Luther, however, could not divide the two natures, for they were identical in the sense that they were in the one Son. “I am determined to know nothing of a Son of God who is not also Mary’s Son who suffered, the God enveloped in humanity who is one Person. I dare not separate the one from the other and say that the humanity is of no use, but only the divinity.”³² John 6 really refers to the eating, the spiritual eating, of Christ in faith. Just as sugar added to water gives the water a new essence, quality and taste, so divinity added to humanity in the one Son makes it impossible to view Christ like any other human being. “Thus one eats the Godhead in the human nature.”³³ one cannot be separated from the other; the divinity of the Word is intrinsically tied to the humanity of the son of Mary.

Thus Luther accepted the communicatio idiomatum in the fullest sense. Zwingli’s notion of the alloeosis³⁴ was “the devil’s mask,” for it robbed the sacrificial death of Christ of its soteriological meaning. All that the Father does in heaven the man Jesus does on earth. Since Christ arose bodily from the grave, His body is present in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Luther’s theory of the ubiquity of Christ’s presence was a logical inference from his Christology. Thus under the visible form of bread and wine are Christ’s invisible body and blood. Bread is really eaten, but at the same time so is the spiritual body of Christ. This is not a matter of human imagining but of the real unification of Christ’s body with the believer. Only the believer understands this, to be sure, for “this is done by the faith of the heart which discerns this treasure and desires it.”³⁵ Thus the redemptive work of Christ was “coextensive with his entire life,” so that when we eat the flesh of Christ, physically and spiritually, “this food is so strong that it transforms its into men who are holy and alive.”³⁶ It made possible the resurrection of the body, and the Lord’s Supper united the human being with God who thus communicated His own immortality to its through the saving work of Christ’s death and resurrection.³⁷

Huldrich Zwingli and the Eucharistic Controversy Zwingli’s Christology is based on several works which relate directly and indirectly to John’s Gospel. His view of the person and work of Christ is quite orthodox, and in this he shared the mainstream with the Christologies of Luther and Calvin. Nevertheless, there are significant nuances within his view. He believed that the divine nature of Christ is more active since the divine nature enters into the human nature but is not absorbed by it. Whereas Luther saw the two natures more dynamically coincident. Zwingli stressed the divine nature. If Luther emphasized God’s revealing, it was Zwingli who emphasized that it was God who was doing the revealing.³⁸

It is well known that Zwingli’s reform was more in line with Erasmian humanism than its Luther counterpart. He used humanist tools and methods to seek a renewal of Christianity based upon strict adherence to the Scriptures. Luther’s application of sola scriptura allowed for those things which did not conflict with the Bible; Zwingli looked for direct examples to emulate and doctrinal teachings to restore. Because of this hermeneutical difference, perhaps, Zwingli was suspicious of things of' a sensory nature, “for body and spirit are such essentially different things that whichever one you take it cannot be the other.”³⁹ Luther’s Christology was more unitive and Alexandrian; Zwingli’s was more divisive and in line with Antiochine tradition, He could not accept the notion of cormmunicatio naturarum to the point of allowing the human nature to become ubiquitous: “If Christ ascended to heaven and sits at the right hand of God, his body cannot be elsewhere.”⁴⁰ So Christ’s body could not be present in the eucharist. Zwingli admitted only the communicatio naturarum, and it is only with regard to the person of the God-man that one can assert with “alloiosim” that the properties of both natures were alike. This would be akin to making statements about individual persons within the Godhead while maintaining its unity: alloeosis is simply a rhetorical device which allows an “interchange,” so that in speaking of one nature we may use terms belonging to the other nature. Thus Zwingli carefully discriminated the two natures of Christ.⁴¹

It was important for Zwingli and the Reformed tradition to maintain the predominance of the infinite, divine nature over the finite, human nature of Christ. As a result, Zwingli’s Christology had a definite Nestorian coloring, (an accusation leveled by John Eck and Luther) which could be read as a kind of subordinationism.⁴² He developed the details of Christ’s earthly life more thoroughly than any reformer, but these were interpreted by Zwingli to show Christ’s divine nature. “The Son of the Most High King came clothed in human flesh in order to be the sacrificial lamb . . . and thus render satisfaction to God's inviolate righteousness, so reconciling him to those who, being conscious of their own sins, could never dare to come into the presence of God trusting in their own righteousness.”⁴³

Such could only be accomplished by a God-man, for “he cannot die according to his human nature.” Yet Christ had to be a pure human being, untainted by sin, for otherwise He could not be a savior of human beings. Only God can save us, but His human suffering was for our salvation: “Now it does not save us to know how he was crucified, or that he was crucified, but that he was crucified for us, and that he who was crucified is our Lord and our God.”⁴⁴

God is really to be found in the human person of Jesus. In his polemic against Eck, Zwingli accused him of “insults and belittlings of the glory and honor of Christ” by denying that the divine nature of Christ could be everywhere, penetrating everything, but the human nature could only be in one place. He attempted to keep the tradition of the two natures of Christ so that there was no slippage into monophysitism or docetism. When it is said that Christ is at the “right hand of the Father,” the meaning does not point to a place but to the figurative notion that He was equally powerful with the Father.45 In fact, this expression gave Zwingli the occasion to develop his eucharistic ideas. If Christ had ascended, in His humanity, into heaven, it was there He was until the day of judgment. Thus the body of the risen Christ in heaven could not be eaten in the Lord’s Supper. Both transubstantiation and Luther’s notion of ubiquity were thereby precluded.⁴⁶

The last pamphlet to come from Zwingli’s pen was Fidei expositio in 1531. It was sent to Francis I and in it he gave his expositions on a number of issues, showing his orthodoxy on such questions as the doctrine of the trinity and the two natures of Christ. It was here, in his mature thinking, that he wrote that Christ took on human nature in such a way that the divine nature was not lost or changed. Yet, Christ was “truly, properly and naturally man.” None of the divine attributes suffer because He took human form. When it is said in the Bible that Christ hungered, it was His human nature so depicted; when it is said that He healed diseases, His divine nature was so depicted. “In general, I confess that God and man are one Christ, just as one man consists of a soul endowed with reason and a dull body, as Saint Athanasius has taught. He took up human nature into the unity of the hypostasis or person of the Son of God. . . . The person of the eternal Son of God assumed humanity into and by virtue of its own power, as holy men of God have truly and clearly shown.”⁴⁷

In the same pamphlet he wrote that the material body of Christ “is not eaten literally and in its essence, but only spiritually” in the Lord’s Supper. Because Christ took on “all the characteristics and endowments that belong to the nature of the human body,” two corollaries follow: one, that the characteristics which are present in our bodies were present in Christ’s body, and two, what corporeality there was in Christ’s body belongs also to our bodies. Therefore, because His body arose from the dead, so will ours. The resurrected body of Christ in heaven, “in virtue of its character as real body,” indicates simply that it cannot be several places any more than ours can. The Lutherans’ position, he wrote, maintained that Christ is present everywhere because He was divine. But the issue was His humanity, not His divinity, and because the former is finite it is incapable of being everywhere. The two natures of Christ do not sever the unity of Christ’s person, and the natures are not confused “as if the divinity had degenerated and been weakened to humanity, or the humanity changed into divinity,” an obvious reference to Luther’s application of the communicatio idiomatum.⁴⁸ When Christ said “This is my body,” He still had a mortal body. He did not have “two bodies of which one was immortal and exempt from physical sensation, the other mortal.” It cannot be, therefore, that we eat His mortal body, with the apostles, while His immortal body sits at the right hand of God. “To eat the body of Christ spiritually is nothing else than to trust in spirit and heart upon the mercy and goodness of God through Christ, that is, to be sure with unshaken faith that God is going to give us pardon for our sins and the joy of everlasting blessedness on account of his Son, who was made wholly ours, was offered for us, and reconciled the divine righteousness to us.”⁴⁹

John Calvin
As has been suggested Calvin followed traditional orthodoxy on matters relating to the trinity and the person and work of Christ. He claimed that Christ had two natures in a single person, so that “he who was the Son of God became the Son of man – not by confusion of substances, but by unity of person.”⁵⁰ Calvin believed that the first ecumenical councils correctly represented the Biblical testimony regarding the person of Christ. A great deal of Calvin’s Christology emerged within his controversial discussions with certain detractors.

Andreas Osiander had contended that even if Adam had not fallen, Christ would still have become incarnate, and thus the purpose of the incarnation was not the redemption of humankind but the fulfillment of creation, a view shared by many Franciscans during the middle ages as well as Michael Servetus. Calvin’s rejection of this view was grounded in his understanding of salvation; his Christology, like Luther’s, was intrinsic to his soteriology. Menno Simons and other Anabaptists held that Christ did not have an earthly flesh, but that His body had come down from heaven and taken form in the virgin’s womb. Calvin called this a “new Marcionite” notion, his reaction to which helped him to hold emphatically to Christ’s humanity and physical descent from Adam.⁵¹

One of Calvin’s most bitter controversies was with Servetus regarding the trinity in 1553. Servetus had claimed that the title “Son of God” meant that Jesus had been begotten in Mary’s womb by the Holy Spirit. Before the incarnation Christ was to be called “Word” and only after the incarnation was He properly called a “Son.” Servetus thought that Calvin’s belief which maintained a discriminate distance between God and humanity was exaggerated. He believed that there was a spark of divinity in each of us; the significant question, for him, was not the union of two opposite natures but how Christ could be called “Son of God” in a special sense not applicable to other beings. Servetus was thus forced to emphasize the unity of the two natures in Christ to the point that Calvin accused him of Monophysitism. In reaction, Calvin stressed the distinction of the two natures.⁵²

Francesco Stancaro had held that Christ is our mediator only through His human nature, probably in refutation of Osiander who taught that Christ mediated only through His divine nature. Against both, Calvin argued that the work of redemption took place through the hypostatic union, and that everything in Christ that had to do with redemption was to be ascribed to the unity of the person and not to one nature or the other. “The significance of this is that toward the end of his life Calvin came to emphasize the communicatio idiomatum to a greater degree than he had before. . . .”⁵³ Earlier, his position had been closer to Zwingli’s. He could not accept the communicatio idiomatum as an argument for the ubiquity of Christ’s presence on the altar. Although the divinity of the second person in the trinity was fully present in Jesus, it was not circumscribed by his humanity, for Christ could not be present in heaven and on several altars at the same time. He was still in heaven while also present in Jesus, and when he was being born from the virgin’s womb he was still filling the entire universe.⁵⁴ This extra calvinisticum certainly leaned heavily in the direction of Antioch rather than Alexandria, but its substance already had been formulated by Zwingli whose Christology was not based as much on soteriology as was Calvin’s.⁵⁵

It was in 1553, the decisive year of the Servetus affair in Geneva, that Calvin wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John. Calvin saw John’s Gospel as different from the other Gospels because it “dwells more largely on the doctrine by which the office of Christ, together with the power of his death and resurrection, is unfolded.”⁵⁶ Indeed, Calvin believed John should be read first since it opened up the meaning of the other Gospels. In his remarks on John 1:1 and the Logos or “Speech” of God, Calvin inveighed against Servetus and Arianism. The Word was always united with God before the world existed, hidden “before he revealed himself in the external structure of the world.”⁵⁷ Like so many other reformers, Calvin referred constantly to Augustine’s Christology; Christ the Word “was obscurely shadowed out to the Fathers under the Law, and at length was more fully manifested in flesh.” Sabellius’ views were refuted here also, for the Word was distinct from the Father, being one of the three hypostases, “Subsistencies or Persons, in the one simple essence of God.” Christ was God in the sense that he shared the same essence with the Father, yet as the Word, Christ was also distinct from the Father. “Now the design of the Evangelist is . . . to show that no sooner was the world created than the Speech of God came forth into external operation; for having formerly been incomprehensible in his essence, he then became publically known by the effect of his power.”⁵⁸

There are two distinct powers which belong to the Son of God: the first, which is manifested in the structure of the world and the order of nature; and, the second, by which He renews and restores fallen nature. The human being was endued with an extraordinary gift of understanding, and although by his revolt against God he lost the light of understanding, he yet sees and understands, “so that what he naturally possesses from the grace of the Son of God is not entirely destroyed.”⁵⁹

In regard to John 1:14, Calvin wrote that the Word or Speech of God became man, taking upon himself flesh. The term “flesh” is not given a Pauline understanding in John, Calvin affirmed, for the meaning was simply that the Word became mortal, “though it marks disdainfully his frail and perishing nature.” Apollinarius was wrong, therefore, in believing that Christ was merely clothed with a human body without a soul. “The plain meaning therefore is, that the Speech begotten of God before all ages, and who always dwelt with the Father, was made man. On this article of faith there are two things chiefly to be observed. The first is. that two natures were so united in one Person in Christ, that one and the same Christ is true God and true man. The second is, that the unity of person does not hinder the two natures from remaining distinct, so that his Divinity retains all that is peculiar to itself, and his humanity holds separately whatever belongs to it.”⁶⁰

Various erroneous positions have been witnessed in the church through the ages. Nestorius acknowledged both natures but “imagined two Christs,” one who was God and another who was man. Eutyches left Christ with neither of the two natures but imagined that they were mingled together. “And in the present day, Servetus and the Anabaptists invent a Christ who is confusedly compounded of two natures, as if he were a Divine man. In words, indeed, he acknowledges that Christ is God; but if you admit his raving imaginations, the Divinity is at one time changed into human nature, and at another time, the nature of man is swallowed up by the Divinity.”⁶¹

But the Evangelist refutes both types of error, “for the Son of God began to be man in such a manner that he still continues to be that eternal Speech who had no beginning of time.”⁶²

We have seen how pivotal John 6 was to the debate concerning the Lord’s Supper among the reformers. Calvin did not seem too pre-occupied, as was Zwingli, with this chapter in John relating to the eucharist, “To eat Christ” was “an effect or work of faith.” So Christ’s discourse did not refer to the Lord’s Supper “but to the uninterrupted communication of the flesh of Christ, which we obtain apart from the use of the Lord’s Supper.”⁶³ Yet, Calvin acknowledged that there was nothing said in John 6 “that is not figuratively represented, and actually bestowed on believers, in the Lord’s Supper,” and that Christ even intended that the communion should be “a seal and confirmation of this sermon.” Calvin believed he was again in the good company of Augustine who, Calvin was convinced, showed that “this mystery is symbolically represented, whenever the churches celebrate the Lord’s Supper. . . .”⁶⁴

God the Father is a “great distance from us,” but Christ’s place between the divine and the human allowed Him to reveal to us what would have otherwise remained concealed. No one can come to Christ as God if that person “despises him as man.” Thus Christ was “clothed not only with our flesh, but with human feelings.” Such were, in Him, pure and free from sin. There was nothing to prevent Christ from having a natural dread of death, but in His desire to obey God He showed that “the pure will of nature will not of itself rebel against God.” Christ was therefore not affected by original sin. Christ had but one battle to fight: to cease from fearing what He naturally feared, as soon as He perceived that the pleasure of God was otherwise. But, on the other hand, because of the sin of Adam, we have two battles, “for we must struggle with the obstinacy of the flesh.”⁶⁵

Calvin’s Christology could be placed somewhere between Luther’s and Zwingli’s views. With Luther he could adopt some aspects of the communicatio idiomatum, but with Zwingli, he tended not to fuse the two natures together, but to emphasize the importance of nothing being allowed to diminish the divinity or divest it of any of its privileges.⁶⁶ Calvin retained the ubiquity of Christ’s divine nature, “But he categorically rejected the ubiquity of the body of the Christ, for the same reasons that made him dismiss anything tending towards the deification of man, even in the person of Christ.”⁶⁷ Locher contends that whereas Luther’s Christology belonged to Christmas, Zwingli’s belonged to Easter or to the Ascension. It would be more correct to say that Calvin’s Christology belonged to Easter and Zwingli’s to the Ascension.⁶⁸ The two Reformed theologians were perhaps closer together, but nevertheless quite far apart in what gave impetus to the doctrine of the person and work of Christ.

Conclusion
By way of conclusion, it should be clear from the foregoing what came to be the mainstream of Christological thinking among magisterial Protestants in the sixteenth century. The mainstream was certainly not monolithic, and various nuances held by Lutheran and Reformed theologians provided a healthful dialectic within which to understand the person and work of Christ, as well as other Christian doctrines and practices. That Luther’s views could be echoed, to some degree, in England by William Tyndalee⁶⁹ and Hugh Latimer⁷⁰ does not mean that they were unflective of the teachings of Zwingli or Calvin. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the Reformed or Rhineland theology made a greater impact on English reformers than did Luther. An example of Reformed influence can be seen by a comparison of the views of Bullinger and John Hooper.⁷¹ One may also see similar continuity with the Reformed tradition by an examination of some of the early eucharistic thought of Thomas Cranmer.⁷²

Not all of this Christological development was based on the Gospel of John. Yet it would be safe to say that without John’s Gospel it doubtless would not have taken the shape that it did. In fact, the Gospel of John was at the heart of the Christology which emerged in sixteenth century Protestant theology.

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