Martin Butzer, often called Bucer, was born at Schlettstadt in Alsace in 1491. He was educated at Udenheim, and, after joining the Dominican Order in 1506, at the University of Heidelberg. He was ordained priest. In 1521 he was dispensed from his monastic vows and transferred to the secular clergy. In 1522 he was made pastor of Landstuhl, and definitely severed himself from the papal side in the conflicts of the time by marrying a nun. He went to Strassburg in 1523, and continued to minister there till 1548, when his opposition to the Interim, by which the Emperor Charles V. endeavoured to prevent any change in matters of religion except the administration of the chalice to the laity and the allowance of the marriage of priests until a general council should have been held, led to his being obliged to leave. On the invitation of Cranmer he came to England and was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, where he died in 1551.
In regard to the Eucharist, a large part of the aim of Bucer was to discover a means of reconciliation between the doctrine of Luther and that of Zwingli, although at times he attacked both, Like Luther, he asserted that the communicant receives the body and blood of Christ. Like Zwingli, he denied that the body and blood are united to the sacramental signs. His own view appears to have been that the communicants receive in the Sacrament only bread and wine; but that their faith, when they receive the elements, uplifts them to a real spiritual participation of the body and blood of Christ in heaven. A series of Nine Propositions Concerning the Holy Eucharist which he set out in 1530 states his opinions in a short form. They are as follows:—
“i. We deny Transubstantiation.
“ii. We deny that the body of Christ is locally in the bread, as if one were to imagine that the body is so contained in the bread as wine is in a cup or as flame is in glowing iron.
“iii. We affirm that the body of Christ is really in the Supper, and that Christ actually present feeds us with His real body and His real blood, using for this purpose His own words which the ministers recite and the holy signs of bread and wine.
“iv. We confess that, as by Baptism there is the power of regeneration, so the very body and blood of Christ are presented (exhiberi) by the symbols of the Eucharist.
“v. We say that these are received by faith alone and simple and unfaltering, as Doctor Cyril says, although we do not shrink even from these words of Doctor Chrysostom, ‘O mighty miracle, O great kindness of God towards us, He who sits above with the Father is at this hour held by the hands of all and gives Himself to those who wish to surround and embrace Him,’ and any like sayings which are found in this and other writers. But we understand these sayings, as Chrysostom himself also teaches, so as to cast away every carnal thought and to say that these things are done in the heavenly places and are seen only by the soul and by the mind.
“vi. We confess with Doctor Augustine that Christ is in some place in heaven because of the manner of His real body; yet none the less we acknowledge that He is really and actually present in the Supper, nevertheless not locally but in a way peculiar to this Sacrament, which exists through words, but words that are believed, and symbols, but symbols that are received by faith. For we confess that they are Sacraments only when they are in use.
“vii. The words of the Evangelists bear witness that the covenant, by which we believe that the body and blood of Christ are present and are offered to us when the bread and the wine are set before us, is made only with those for whom these were sacrificed.
“viii. We confess that those who are possessed of faith can yet be in such a relation not of faith to these sacred gifts that they become guilty of the body and blood not absent but present, as actually happened to the Corinthians.
“ix. The Sacraments of Christians are assuredly the signs and testimonies of Christ present, not absent.”
In a letter written in 1533 Bucer very emphatically maintained that he had not at any time denied that Christ is spiritually present in the Eucharist.
“In all my writings I bear witness that there is specially in the Holy Supper a presentation (exhibitionem) of the body and blood of Christ which is most real because it is heavenly and spiritual. I have never attacked anything but impanation and carnal eating. Never at any time have I denied that which is actual and efficacious. Yet none the less there is a figure in the words of the Lord because more is understood than is said. The bread is shown and given to the senses, and at the same time the body of the Lord, that is, the communion of the Lord, is presented (exhibetur) and given (traditur) to faith, so that we may be members of His flesh and of His bones. God forbid that I should say that Christ is absent from the Supper of Christians.”
Bucer was largely instrumental in promoting the temporary agreement between the Lutheran and the Swiss Reformers on the subject of the Eucharist at the convention held at Wittenberg in 1536. At this convention Bucer and his friends stated that they held that “the real body and real blood of Christ are presented (exhiberi) and given and taken together with the visible signs of bread and wine,” and that “the body and blood of Christ are offered to all who receive the Sacrament by the minister of the Church, and are taken not only by the worthy, who receive them with heart and mouth to salvation, but also by the unworthy, who receive them with the mouth to their judgment and condemnation”; and Luther explained that “he did not unite the body and blood with the bread and wine by any natural bond, and did not locally enclose them in the bread and wine”. As a result of these mutual explanations, a formula drawn up by Melanchthon was for the time agreed to by both parties.
“We have heard Doctor Bucer explaining his own opinion and that of others who are with him concerning the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ as follows:—
“1. They confess according to the words of Irenaeus that the Eucharist consists of two things, an earthly and a heavenly. Therefore they hold and teach that together with the bread and wine there are really and substantially present and presented (exhiberi) and taken the body and blood of Christ.
“2. And although they deny that Transubstantiation takes place, and do not hold that any local inclusion is in the bread, or that there is any lasting conjunction outside the use of the Sacrament, yet they allow that the bread is the body of Christ by sacramental union, that is, they hold that, when the bread is offered to the communicants, the body of Christ is at the same time present and is really presented (exhiberi). For they hold that the body of Christ is not present outside the use, when the bread is reserved in the pyx or shown in processions after the custom of the papists.
“3. Moreover, they hold that this institution of the Sacrament is valid in the Church, and does not depend on the worthiness of the minister or the receiver. Wherefore, as Paul says that the unworthy also eat, so they hold that the body and blood are really offered to the unworthy and that the unworthy take them when the words and institution of Christ are preserved. But such take to judgment, as Paul says, because they abuse the Sacrament, since they use it without repentance and without faith. For it is set out for this end, to bear witness that the benefits of Christ are applied to those who exercise repentance and raise themselves by faith in Christ, and that these are washed by the blood of Christ.”
In the same year 1536 Bucer published his two Retractations, in which he allowed that Luther did not hold “a natural union of the body of the Lord with the bread or a circumscribed inclusion of it in the bread,” and that Zwingli and Oecolampadius did not hold that “in the Supper there are mere symbols without Christ”.
It is probable that in the statements of 1536 Bucer, in order to promote the reconciliation which he desired between the Lutherans and the Swiss Reformers, went to the furthest limit which he thought possible in a Lutheran direction, and that his mind is more fairly represented by the phraseology of the Nine Propositions of 1530 already quoted and of his Letter to Peter Martyr in 1549 and his Confession Concerning the Holy Eucharist of 1550. In the latter he wrote:—
“Three things are bestowed and received, the symbols of bread and wine, the body and blood of the Lord, and the ratification of the new covenant and of the remission of sins.… Here is the presence of Christ, whether it is offered and testified only by words or also by Sacraments, not of place, not of sense, not of reason, not of earth, but of the spirit, of faith, of heaven, insofar as we through faith are raised to heaven and placed there together with Christ, and lay hold of Him in His heavenly majesty and embrace Him as He is shown and offered to us by the mirror and riddle of words and Sacraments discernible by sense. But the anti-Christs persuade the more simple from these words that we here receive and possess Christ present in some manner of this world or enclosed in or joined together with the bread and wine or under their accidents in such a way that He ought to be adored and worshipped. Therefore the teachable are to be taught that there is no presence of Christ in the Eucharist except in the lawful use of it and that which is grasped and held only by faith.”
The First Confession of Basle, first drafted by Oecolampadius in 1531, modified to its present form by Oswald Geisshuessler, usually known as Myconius, in 1532, and published in 1534, represents the Swiss theology as influenced by the lines of thought which were characteristic of Bucer. It contains the following article on the subject of the Eucharist:—
“We confess that the Lord Jesus instituted His Holy Supper for a memorial of His holy passion together with thanksgiving, to proclaim His death, and to bear witness to Christian love and unity and true faith. And, as in Baptism (in which cleansing from sins, which nevertheless is accomplished only by the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, is offered to us through the minister of the Church) real water remains, so also in the Supper of the Lord (in which the real body of the Lord and the real blood of Christ is represented and offered to us through the minister of the Church together with bread and wine) the bread and wine remain. But we believe firmly that Christ Himself is the food of believing souls to eternal life, and that our souls through true faith in the crucified Christ are given the flesh and blood of Christ as food and drink, so that we, the members of His body our only Head, may live in Him, and that He may live in us, who in the last day will rise through Him and in Him to eternal joy and happiness. But we do not include in the Lord’s food and drink the natural and real and substantial body of Christ, which was born of the pure Virgin Mary and suffered for us and ascended into heaven. Therefore we do not adore Christ in the signs of bread and wine, which we commonly call the Sacraments of the body and blood of Christ, but in heaven at the right hand of God the Father, whence He will come to judge the living and the dead.”
The Second Confession of Basle, more often called the First Helvetic Confession, was drawn up by a number of Swiss divines in 1536, partly as a result of the efforts of Bucer and others to promote unity between the Lutheran and the Swiss Reformers and partly in view of the probable summoning of a general council by the Pope. It probably bears the mark of Bucer’s influence. In the twentieth article, which deals with the Sacraments in general, it is said:—
“These symbols of hidden things do not consist of bare signs but of signs together with things.… In the Eucharist bread and wine are the signs. But the thing is the communication of the body of Christ, the accomplished salvation, and the remission of sins, which indeed are received by faith, as the signs by the body, and in the thing itself is the whole fruit of the Sacraments. Wherefore we assert that the Sacraments are not only certain marks (tesseras) of the Christian society but also symbols of the grace of God, by which the ministers co-operate with the Lord to that end which He Himself promises and offers and effects; yet in such a way that, as has been said of the ministry of the word, all the power of salvation is ascribed to the Lord alone.”
The twenty-second article is on the Eucharist. It is as follows:—
“The mystic Supper is that in which the Lord really offers His body and blood, that is, Himself, to His people, so that more and more He may live in them and they in Him; not that the body and blood of the Lord are naturally united to the bread and wine, but that the bread and wine are ordained by the Lord to be symbols by which the real communication of His body and blood may be presented (exhibeatur) by the Lord Himself by means of the ministry of the Church not for food of the belly that shall perish but for the sustenance of eternal life. Therefore we often use this sacred food, since by His command, beholding the death of the Crucified and His blood with the eyes of faith, and contemplating our salvation not without taste of the life of heaven and a true sense of eternal life, we are re-made with ineffable sweetness by this spiritual and lifegiving and inner food, and we exult with joy which no words can describe because of the life which we have found, and we all with all our strength pour out thanksgiving for the wonderful kindness of Christ towards us. Therefore the opinion of some that we assign too little to the holy symbols is not at all deserved by us. For these are holy and venerable things as being instituted and used by the High Priest Christ, exhibiting in their own way, as we have said, the things signified, affording testimony to that which has been done, representing difficult realities, and bringing the most clear light to those mysteries by a certain wonderful analogy to the things that are signified. For these purposes they supply help and aid to faith itself, and finally they bind him who is initiated by them in lieu of an oath. So holily do we think of the sacred symbols. But we assign the force and power of the Quickener and Sanctifier to Him who is eternal, who is Life, to whom be praise for ever and ever.”