The Marburg Colloquy

Philip of Hesse called the colloquy for reasons that were as much political as theological. The reformers at Marburg represented cities and territories whose military cooperation Philip judged essential if Protestant Europe was to withstand pressure from the Catholic emperor Charles V, and doctrinal division between the Lutheran and Swiss Reformed movements stood in the way of any such alliance. Philip Melanchthon drafted a set of articles beforehand, and the delegates worked through them one by one over three days: on the nature of God, original sin, Christ's person and work, justification by faith, the authority of scripture, baptism and much else, the Lutheran and Reformed positions proved close enough to produce agreement without great difficulty.

By the time discussion reached the Lord's Supper, the fifteenth and final article, the two sides had spent themselves finding common ground everywhere else, which if anything sharpened the contrast when they could not find it here. Zwingli reportedly wept at the failure to reach full agreement despite the extent of what had been settled, and both sides left Marburg still willing to call each other fellow Christians while remaining unable to share communion together on the basis of what each held that sacrament actually to be.

Tradition holds that Luther, before the debate on the Eucharist began, wrote the words hoc est corpus meum, this is my body, in chalk on the table before him, a visible reminder that he read Christ's own words at the Last Supper as literal rather than figurative and would not be argued away from that reading regardless of what philosophical or logical objections Zwingli raised. Zwingli, for his part, pointed to Christ's ascension into heaven and to other biblical language that used the same verb, is, in a plainly symbolic sense elsewhere in scripture, arguing that Luther's literalism was neither necessary nor consistent.

The failure to agree on this single article carried consequences well beyond the colloquy itself. Philip's hoped for military alliance did not come together in the form he wanted, and the Lutheran and Reformed traditions developed afterward as separate confessional families, eventually formalized in distinct confessional documents, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession and the various Reformed confessions that followed. The Eucharistic dispute opened at Marburg was never closed between the two traditions and remains one of the clearest doctrinal lines separating Lutheran from Reformed Protestantism into the present day.