Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 62:1 (Spring 2000)
Article: “Framing” Sacramental Theology: Trinity And Symbol
Author: Peter J. Leithart

WTJ 62:1 (Spring 2000) p. 1

“Framing” Sacramental Theology:
Trinity And Symbol

Peter J. Leitharti

J. P. S. Uberoi has argued that modern culture emerged from Reformation disputes about the nature of the eucharistic presence. According to his account, the “modern concept of time in which every event was either spiritual and mental or corporeal and material but no event was or could be both at once” was a product of the “double monism,” the separation of symbol and reality, inherent in Zwingli’s eucharistic theology. Implicitly, all sides in the Reformation debate accepted Zwingli’s assumption of “two separate and distinct spheres of spiritual and mystical versus material and corporeal presences.” Even the Tridentine doctrine of transubstantiation was “no longer a normal transaction of God and man in this world” but a “kind of miraculous transference by God’s agency between two separate places and two different times.” Modernity, in short, was born at Marburg in 1529.1

Henri de Lubac places the rupture between reality and symbol several centuries earlier, noting that during the medieval eucharistic debates, the

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orthodox gained a monopoly on “truth” while the heretics retained symbol: “Au mystice, non vere repond, non moins exclusif, un vere, non mystice.” In de Lubac’s detailed retelling, Berengar rather than Zwingli is the harbinger of the future.2 Alexander Schmemann agrees.3 Similarly, Henning Graf Reventlow finds the origins of modern critical biblical studies in late medieval Spiritualism, which placed such stress on the possession of the Spirit as to render “superfluous both the letters of Holy Scripture and all external forms of the communication of salvation … above all the sacraments and the clergy.” Antipathy to external ceremony among English Puritans was likewise a “stimulus in later biblical interpretation for the denigration of all that was priestly” and for the notion that Hebrew religion declined from “a pure and natural form to a final form distorted by ritualism,” a notion later developed into a basic hermeneutical principle by Julius Wellhausen.4

Colin Gunton, by contrast, traces the origins of various dilemmas of modern theology and culture to an incipient Unitarianism in the western doctrine of God. Paradoxically, while modernity has presented itself as a Heraclitean assertion of the rights of the many against the monistic Parmenidean past, it has produced...