The Lord's Supper in the Reformed Confessions

Abstract

“Schaff's judgment, that Calvin's eucharistic teaching ‘must be regarded as the orthodox Reformed doctrine,’ oversimplifies the evidence. In actual fact, Zwingli's view continued to find its way into the confessions even after Calvin's emergence as foremost leader of the Reformed Church. Moreover, Bullinger's Second Helvetic Confession (1561/3) exhibits a third eucharistic type. There seem to be, then, three doctrines of the Eucharist in the Reformed confessions, which we may label ‘symbolic memorialism,’ ‘symbolic parallelism,’ and ‘symbolic instrumentalism.’”