Memorialism

The Zurich reformer's case rested on three moves rather than one. The first was grammatical: in the words this is my body, the verb was read as carrying the sense of signifies, a usage he found elsewhere in scripture where a rock is called Christ or a seed is called the word. The second was about the body of Christ itself. A risen body is a real body, and a real body is in one place; since Christ has ascended and sits at the right hand of the Father, that body cannot also be on every altar at once without ceasing to be a body at all. The third was pastoral and polemical. A presence located in an object invites the veneration of an object, and Zurich had come to regard that as idolatry. He set the argument out in his Commentary on True and False Religion of 1525, and the city replaced the Mass with a plain service at a wooden table in the same year.

Luther refused every step of it. At the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, convened by Philip of Hesse in the hope of a common Protestant front against the Emperor, the two sides agreed fourteen articles and broke on the fifteenth. Luther is reported to have written the Latin words of institution on the table and declined to move from them. The failure was political as much as theological, and it fixed a division that has never closed.

The label memorialism is a later convenience, and Zwingli's own writing is wider than it suggests. In the confessions of faith he composed at the end of his life he speaks of Christ present to the contemplating faith of the assembled congregation, and how much weight that language should carry is argued among historians rather than agreed.

Memorialist language is confessed today across the Baptist, Anabaptist, Restorationist, Pentecostal and much of the wider evangelical world, and the shape of the service follows from it. The furniture is a table rather than an altar. The presiding minister reads the institution narrative as a warrant for what the congregation is doing rather than as a formula that changes anything, and deacons or elders carry the elements out to the seated congregation, often in trays of individual glasses, an arrangement adopted in the late nineteenth century on grounds of hygiene. Frequency varies widely: monthly or quarterly across much of the Baptist world, and weekly among the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, who treat the supper as a fixed part of every Lord's Day assembly.

Who may preside is treated as a question of church order rather than of sacramental power. Many Baptist congregations expect an ordained minister at the table; the Brethren traditions and some Baptist churches allow any recognised elder, or any member, to give thanks over the bread and cup.

The label is contested from inside. A number of Baptist and Reformed Baptist theologians argue that their own confessional documents, and the Second London Confession of 1689 in particular, follow the Westminster Assembly in affirming that believers really receive Christ, and that memorialism describes their congregational practice better than it describes their confessions. Others in the same churches hold the plain memorial reading and regard any further claim as an import from elsewhere.