Review: The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist

The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy EucharistThe Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist by John Williamson Nevin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Here’s the myth: Roman Catholicism invents the idea that the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper actually conveys grace. This eventually becomes the superstition of Transubstantiation. Then Luther and Calvin rise up and liberate the masses from such belief in magic. Luther never quite liberates himself, but Calvin gives us Luther’s justification by faith undergirded by nothing more than hard-core predestinarianism. The sacraments are simply symbols, pictures, and/or dramatizations of a spiritual truth designed to bring it into the participant’s remembrance.

Nevin’s The Mystical Presence: A Vindication of the Reformed or Calvinistic Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist was a reality check for American Evangelicalism. He demonstrated that the assumption of American "puritans" that their heritage came from sixteenth-century Geneva was a delusion. Calvin believed and taught repeatedly and emphatically that believers truly partook of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Lord’s Supper. The idea that the Eucharist was a "naked" symbol was a complete abomination in Calvin’s eyes.

Nevin’s makes his case masterfully. He quotes copiously from Calvin to show that His view of the real presence of Christ in the rite was not an obscure part of his teaching but an essential component of his theology. He also explains how Calvin’s view of the Eucharist was essential to his soteriology. For Calvin, a person is not saved from the wrath of God simply because God imputes "in a merely outward way" Christ’s righteousness to him. A person is saved because he is incorporated into Christ’s human body so that he is more intimately bound to Christ than a branch to a tree, a member of a body to his head, or a human to Adam. Only those united to Christ in this way by the power of the Holy Spirit can benefit from Christ’s righteousness, having it imputed to them as His glorified human life is imparted to them. This is the same once-and-for-all forensic declaration, but it is not baseless, in Nevin’s view. Those who belong to Jesus have his righteousness. Calvin was not unambiguous on this point.

The Lord’s Supper, says Nevin, according to Calvin and the other sixteenth-century Reformers, renews and strengthens this union. We are truly given Christ’s human body by the Holy Spirit when we partake of the Sacrament. Anything less would not be sufficient for our salvation and sanctification.

Nevin carefully distinguishes Calvin’s view not only from the socinians and other rationalists, but from that of traditional Lutherans and Roman Catholics. Regarding the former, Nevin must have made his contemporary Evangelical readers wince when he pointed out that their view was identical to that of Unitarians and other liberals of the day. On the other hand, unlike tran- and consubstantiation, Calvin’s view did not allow for actual material particles to be locally present in the elements or to pass into the bodies of partakers.

Probably one of the most difficult aspects of Calvin’s view was his insistence on a real participation in Christ’s flesh and blood without any matter being transported into the participant. Thus, Nevin’s attempt to formulate and improve on Calvin’s explanation is perhaps one of the most valuable aspects of the book. Nevin make the rather obvious but head-aching comment that a physical organism does not consist in particular physical particles! Living human beings pass out and ingest new particles all the time. Our human body is actually a "law" or "force" which must have matter to exist but is not identical with it. An acorn is considered identical to the oak tree which grows from it, but the oak tree is exponentially more massive and probably does not possess one material particle in common with the acorn from which it originated. By these analogies Nevin clears away the conceptual difficulties which make Calvin’s view hard to believe. It would do no good if mere dead particles from Christ’s flesh were transported into us. What we need is Christ’s life. By the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s resurrected, glorified, human life is given to us so that we become sharers in it.

There is much else of value in Nevin’s work, more than I can recite from memory as I punch out this brief review. Perhaps the most questionable portion of Nevin’s work is his exegesis.
The texts he uses are very similar to those used by Richard Gaffin in Resurrection & Redemption: A Study in Pauline Soteriology. In other words, Nevin was a century ahead of the cutting edge of conservative Reformed scholarship.

Anyone claiming to be Evangelical and/or Reformed needs to read this book. There is simply nothing else like it. You will never be the same again.

View all my reviews

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *