John Calvin on the Lord's Supper
Real but spiritual presence, received by faith
The presence of Christ in the Supper we must hold to be such as neither affixes him to the element of bread, nor encloses him in bread, nor circumscribes him in any way... and it must, moreover, be such as neither divests him of his just dimensions, nor dissevers him by differences of place, nor assigns to him a body of boundless dimensions, diffused through heaven and earth.
THE POSITION
Christ is truly given and truly received, but the body stays in heaven and the Spirit does the carrying: 'what our mind does not comprehend let faith conceive—viz. that the Spirit truly unites things separated by space' (Institutes IV.xvii.10). Calvin fights on two fronts in the same chapter. Against a merely local presence he refuses any account that encloses Christ in the bread or gives him 'a body of boundless dimensions, diffused through heaven and earth,' since both wreck the true humanity (IV.xvii.19); the argument at IV.xvii.16-17 tracks the Lutheran 'in, with and under' and the ubiquity it requires, and says it makes Christ's body a phantasm and reopens the door to Marcion.
16 Is not the cup of blessing that we bless a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?
8 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Reformer of Geneva and the most systematic of the first-generation Reformers. This entry rests on the 1559 Institutes of the Christian Religion in Henry Beveridge's translation, checked section by section, with Calvin's own commentaries on 1 John, John, the Harmony of the Evangelists, the Psalms and the Harmony of the Law used where the Institutes are thin.
Cite this page
"John Calvin on the Lord's Supper", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/calvin/lords-supper (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/calvin/lords-supper).