Position · 1525

Memorialism

The view that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial of Christ’s death, in which bread and wine are signs and Christ is present to faith rather than bodily in the elements.

Huldrych Zwingli, the reformer of Zurich, read “This is my body” as “This signifies my body” and argued that Christ’s body is in heaven. He rejected Transubstantiation and, at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, also Martin Luther’s Sacramental Union. Reformed churches later followed John Calvin’s Spiritual Presence instead, but a memorial view became common among Anabaptists, Baptists and many later evangelical churches.