Philip Melanchthon on the Lord's Supper

True bodily presence in, with, and under the elements

THE POSITION

In 1530 he wrote the Lutheran real-presence article, complete with the German gloss 'under the form of bread and wine' and a condemnation of those who teach otherwise. In 1540 he rewrote his own article: the body and blood are 'truly exhibited with the bread and wine' to those who eat, and the condemnation is simply deleted. That is the Variata. Schaff's judgment is that after 1534 Melanchthon quietly gave up oral manducation for himself while refusing to condemn it, and that his late eucharistic theology came close to Calvin's.

1 OTHER HOLD THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Luther's colleague at Wittenberg and the Reformation's systematizer. He wrote the first Protestant systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521), drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology (1531), and then revised his own work far enough that the Formula of Concord condemned the later version seventeen years after his death. This entry rests on the Augsburg Confession read in Latin and English — Part I less Articles VI-VIII and XIV-XVI, plus Part II Articles XXII-XXIV and XXVIII — on the opening articles of the Apology in English, and on the successive editions of the Loci through Latin sentences preserved by Schaff and Bente; no edition of the Loci itself was read.