Eating the Gospel: Sacramental Mediation and the Failure of Eucharistic Unity at Marburg

This article reinterprets the Eucharistic controversy at the Marburg Colloquy as a conflict over sacramental mediation and the communication of the benefits of the gospel, rather than merely a disagreement over the mode of Christ’s presence. Focusing on Luther and Zwingli, it argues that their failure to achieve Eucharistic unity emerged from competing understandings of how the benefits of the gospel are communicated, remembered, and embodied through ritual eating. Luther construed the Supper through the logic of gratia extra nos, in which Christ gives himself through the external promise attached to bread and wine. Zwingli, by contrast, understood the Supper through communal remembrance, confession, and Spirit-enabled participation directed toward the exalted Christ. By reading the controversy through the categories of embodied grammar, sacred temporality, and ecclesial boundary, the article shows why shared eating became the visible limit of Protestant unity. The Marburg dispute thus reveals that the Eucharist functioned not only as a doctrinal question but also as an embodied practice of worship through which Protestant communities imagined communion, authority, and participation in Christ.