The Lord’s Supper

The Lord’s Supper stood out as the most important ritual of sacred community for both migrants and their hosts. But there were competing understandings of its meaning and purpose. On the one hand, particularly from the perspective of leaders of the cities and their parish churches, the celebration of the Eucharist represented a social act as much as an individual one. Since the Middle Ages, the rite had stood as a symbolic representation of the Christian community itself, beyond its purpose in reconciling an individual with Christ.1 Bossy, “Mass as a Social Institution”; Rubin, Corpus Christi; Wandel, Eucharist in the Reformation, 14–93. The Eucharist simultaneously symbolized the universal corpus Christianum and the spiritual unity of the participants’ own sacral community, which they presented as a kind of corpus Christianum in miniature.2 James, “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body”; Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, 166–90. Of course, such rhetoric was often rhetorical more than real and hid all kinds of divisions, hierarchies, and resentments. Hsia, “Myth of the Commune”; Roper, “Common Man’.” This dual feature of the Lord’s Supper is a key factor in why disputes about the Eucharist were among the most heated of the Reformation era—they were not simply about individual salvation but also about protecting the Christian community itself.3 Spohnholz, “Multiconfessional Celebration.” Threats to communion constituted visceral danger to the social and political order and to the salvation of the entire civic community. Protecting the religious unity of a eucharistic community could be cast as a defense of the universal Christian church.

The Lord’s Supper also took on a distinct valence in the Dutch Reformed tradition. Reformed Protestants defined their church and the congregations that belonged to it around the eucharistic community, which constituted the pure assembly of the faithful.4 On the relationship between the Lord’s Supper and Christian discipline in the Dutch Reformed tradition, see especially Roodenburg, Onder censuur. They worried about dangers to the individual but also to the community in partaking of the Supper in a state of sinfulness. To ensure the purity of the Lord’s Supper, Reformed Protestants put considerable emphasis on self-examination before the sacrament but also gave a key role to elders in monitoring the worthiness of church members for the sacrament. Critical to Reformed understandings of the church was that individuals had to make a choice to profess their faith and a promise to live according to the standards of the church in order to join a congregation. This often meant, necessarily, that the body of the faithful could not include all members of the civic community.5 Roodenburg, Onder censuur, 82–85. The congregation could constitute a local expression of the true church, but it no longer coincided with the social body of the civic community, in the medieval sense.

Because of their understanding of the church, Reformed elders worked hard to ensure the purity of the Lord’s Supper. As Wesel’s Reformed elders wrote,

In accordance with these views, pastors and elders used disciplinary procedures to ensure that no one gained access to the Lord’s Supper in a state of moral compromise or doctrinal error. Elders also sought to keep people who were in a state of conflict or anger from polluting the spirit of Christian peace and unity expressed in the sacrament.7 Roodenburg, Onder censuur, 348–50. Joining a congregation required submitting oneself to the disciplinary oversight of the consistory in all matters of life. Guy de Bres’s 1561 Belgic Confession, which all the Dutch Reformed migrant communities in our study accepted as an expression of their faith, even made discipline one of the marks of the true church.8 “The Belgic Confession of Faith, 1561,” in Cochrane, Reformed Confessions, 210–11. For Dutch Reformed, the Lord’s Supper needed to be celebrated by members of their congregation, and only members of their congregation.9 See also Parker, “Moral Agency”; Wandel, Eucharist in the Reformation, 139–207; Mentzer, Sin and the Calvinists; Mentzer, Moreil, and Chareyre, Dire l’interdit.

For the rites of passage discussed earlier, there were important reasons that the act be public, even if that meant crossing confessional or political boundaries. There were practical reasons for this—they all had important civic implications that promoted social honor, defined legal status, and ensured property claims. There were also theological reasons. In the minds of Reformed Protestants, marriage and funerals had no sacramental status and, while baptism did, they emphatically rejected the believer’s baptism promoted by Anabaptists. Reformed Protestants thus recognized the legitimacy of any of these three rites of passage in Catholic and Lutheran churches, and vice versa. None of this was true of the Lord’s Supper. It need not be public. It could not be administered by secular authorities. Taking Holy Communion in another church was not acceptable. The celebration of the Eucharist became a symbolic act that defined one’s congregation (gemeente), one’s membership in the church (ecclesia), and one’s commitment to a Reformed moral and spiritual order.

Surviving protocols of consistories for Dutch Reformed congregations in the Holy Roman Empire testify to the centrality of church discipline to their understanding of the nature of the church. For each congregation, elders visited all members before the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which usually took place four times per year, inquiring into their beliefs, lifestyle, and personal relationships, and encouraging them to prepare themselves for the sacrament. During the rest of the year, Reformed elders responded to concerns from church members about the transgressions of other church members and investigated suspicious conduct themselves. They usually admonished violators, first discreetly at home. If necessary, they summoned the person for a more formal reprimand. The only punishment at the disposal of pastors and elders was limiting a church member’s access to the Lord’s Supper—thus, cutting them off from the congregation, the local embodiment of Christ’s church. In Frankfurt, Aachen, and Cologne, elders also submitted to the censura morum, a kind of mutual investigation into one another; there is no evidence whether the other congregations in our study used this practice.10 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 111. On the censura morum, see Becker, Gemeindeordnung und Kirchenzucht, 90–92.

We have a general sense of how communion services went. We know that the Dutch-speaking Reformed congregations in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Frankenthal used the liturgy of the Electoral Palatinate.11 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 383–88. For a general summary of Reformed liturgies of communion, Mentzer, “Reformed Liturgical Practices.” We don’t know much about the form of communion in Aachen or the small semi-clandestine congregations in Cleves. Goch’s congregation seems to have used the French Ecclesiastical Discipline (Discipline ecclésiastique) from 1559, since a Dutch translation, apparently from 1570, can be found in the congregation’s extant records. However, this document does not discuss the eucharistic rite. Van Booma, Communio clandestina, 1:53–58; Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, xlvii–xlix. Members sat together around a table. The services include a sermon, an exhortation about the meaning of the sacrament, and then prayer and psalm singing. During the ceremony, elders distributed ordinary table bread (rather than unleavened wavers), which they broke during the ceremony to symbolize that Christ was not present in the bread, but at God’s side in heaven, as well as wine.12 See, for instance, Kirchenordnung, Wie es… inn der Chur und Fürtlichen Pfalz bey Rhein, 42. Among Dutch Reformed Protestants, Petrus Dathenus was an early advocate for the centrality of bread breaking as a Reformed ritual, which he may have taken from Jan Łaski in London. He practiced this rite in Frankfurt, Frankenthal, and Heidelberg. See also on this point, Spohnholz, Convent of Wesel, 50–51, 53. On breaking of the bread, see Nischan, “‘Fractio Panis’”; Olson, “‘Fractio Panis’.” Communicants also placed their bread into their own mouths to symbolize their active role in embracing Christ. We have learned of no controversies over the form of the ritual or significant debates within the congregations about its meaning. As a result, we know little about the ritual of communion in practice beyond the liturgical guides.

The celebration of the Lord’s Supper in these Reformed congregations emphasized congregational unity. When necessary, congregations tried to be discrete so as not to anger their non-Reformed neighbors. Thus, in places where their version of Holy Communion was banned, they rotated locations for communion celebrations, often in an elder’s house, a barn rented specifically for that purpose, or another inconspicuous location. Sometimes they also celebrated the sacrament in small groups to avoid drawing attention to themselves.13 In Frankfurt, the Dutch Reformed worshiped openly in the Weißfrauenkirche from 1554 to 1562, during which time their method of celebrating the Lord’s Supper sparked enormous controversy and became the chief reason for the closure of their church in 1562. Except for Frankenthal, this was the only case in our study in which Reformed Protestant migrants worshipped openly in a church building designed specifically for that purpose. When it seemed too dangerous to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, they canceled or postponed the service, and there is no evidence of protest or anxiety about this decision.14 Though Reformed Protestants reopened a Dutch-speaking congregation in Frankfurt in 1570, they postponed celebrating the Lord’s Supper for eighteenth months out of caution. Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 146–47. The celebrations were designated for members of that congregation’s eucharistic community alone. In April 1582 the classis of Cleves allowed elders to travel to the town of Orsoy to celebrate Holy Communion in the town of Baerl, in the county of Moers, “to help build the congregation there.”15 Simons, Synodalbuch, 572; Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 138. For a similar case involving travel outside the duchy, see Simons, Synodalbuch, 569. But this exception required explicit approval to ensure that extracongregational communion helped build Christ’s church in times of need rather than undermine the Christian discipline.

There were some people—notably in the confessionally ambiguous terrain of Cleves’ small hometowns—who affiliated with the Reformed tradition but did not put Christian discipline at the center of their understanding of the church. These included those with express permission to attend Reformed sermons but would not submit to the discipline. These individuals were excluded from the Lord’s Supper. For the most part, they seem to have celebrated the sacraments in local parish churches, whether they were Catholic or mixed Catholic-Lutheran. Some also traveled to Wesel, where the Protestant communion was more inclusive. Elders from Xanten complained about this practice in April 1579 and April 1581.16 Simons, Synodalbuch, 520, 521, 557, 563, 564, 573, 578; Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 143–50. Starting about mid-1570, the Flemish noblewoman Clara van der Dilft (known as the Lady of Arnhem) had hired a pastor, Gerhard Loeffs, who maintained a Reformed congregation separate from the Reformed congregation that was part of the classis of Cleves (and thus the Dutch Reformed ecclesiastical system). Records about this alternative church are unclear, but Inge Schipper has pieced together a reasonable picture.17 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 95–108. The Lady of Arnhem’s church allowed Christians to take part in the Lord’s Supper without subjecting themselves to any disciplinary oversight. We have no record of Van Arnhem’s religious views or evidence of her motivations. The only surviving evidence stems from the efforts of elders in Goch’s other Reformed congregation to close her church. By April 1577, they succeeded. It’s not clear how many Reformed Netherlanders joined the Lady of Arnhem’s congregation. But since the main difference seems to have been about the practice of consistorial discipline, it seems likely that those who did had a more inclusive understanding of the eucharistic community.18 In this sense, her church bore some similarity to the so-called libertine church led by Hubert Duifhuis starting in 1578 (who was living at the time in Cologne). Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines, 68–110. However, the antagonism that Van der Dilft and Loeffs proved among the elders across town only further underscores how important church discipline was to their understanding of the church.

Meanwhile, magistrates and city pastors in (almost) all the host communities in our study—whether in Catholic Cologne, Lutheran Frankfurt, or in confessionally mixed Goch—remained centrally committed to the premise that their city or town constituted a sacral community, and having a single public rite was essential to upholding peace and unity (under their oversight). That is, they were uncompromising on keeping the civic and ecclesiastical systems united. Heterodox worship thus remained illegal overall. Accordingly, where congregations of other confessions operated, they did so only discreetly, out of open view.19 On this phenomenon, more broadly, see Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy.” The period in which the Reformed operated the Weißfrauenkirche in Frankfurt, from 1554 to 1562, is no exception to this rule. Magistrates only permitted a public church because the Reformed newcomers claimed to not understand the German used in the local church but insisted that they shared the faith of the local congregation. Once it became clear that their congregation followed incompatible doctrinal and liturgical norms—and thus constituted a separate church and not just a separate congregation—magistrates shut it down.20 See Scholz, Strange Brethren, 101–4.

The striking exception is Wesel, where both celebrations—communion as an expression of sacral communalism of the city and a Reformed sacrament that only those under consistorial discipline partook of—happened at the same time in the very same ritual. As we have seen, Wesel’s magistrates made attendance at the Lord’s Supper in the parish churches compulsory. Authorities reacted with alarm when they learned that newly arrived Reformed Protestants wanted to form a separate eucharistic community.21 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 44. “If they want to come here on account of God’s Word,” the city council had ordered in January 1554, “they should experience the common prayer and the distribution of the sacrament in the church.”22 Quoted from Wolters, Reformationsgeschichte, 155. The original archival records of council minutes from this period no longer exist, but Wolter’s other transcriptions have been verified as accurate. By 1564, as a way of calming the hostilities that broke out around this question, magistrates focused their attention on preserving unity in peaceable praxis, rather than in doctrine or liturgy. That is, they required Lutherans, Catholics, and Reformed to celebrate communion together.23 Spohnholz, “Multiconfessional Celebration.” How pastors, magistrates, and ordinary citizens—to say nothing of members of Catholic religious orders—understood the theology of this ritual act is unclear. But when anyone spoke of the matter, they used the language of promoting “peace and unity” in the city and in the church.24 On similar language of “good order” used by political officials in the region, see Wilhelm Janssen, “‘Gute Ordnung’ als Element der Kirchenpolitik in den Vereinigten Hertzogtümern Jülich-Kleve-Berg,” in Dietz and Ehrenpreis, Drei Konfessionen in einer Region, 33–48.

But parallel to this shared celebration of Holy Communion, and subsumed within the larger civic celebration, Reformed Protestant migrants in Wesel maintained the system of Reformed ecclesiastical discipline largely as it was practiced elsewhere. Reformed Protestants could submit to Christian discipline overseen by the elders, who determined whether they could attend the Lord’s Supper in one of the city’s two parish churches. While magistrates and pastors never officially recognized the consistory or its authority to discipline those under elders’ supervision, they unofficially permitted it to function. The elders’ authority thus remained informal—those who disagreed with their judgment could simply attend the Lord’s Supper in the city’s churches just as ordinary city residents did. The elders’ leverage here thus depended on Reformed Protestants’ internal commitment to self-examination as a precondition for the sacrament and, perhaps, to their hope that elders might one day write them a letter of recommendation should they move elsewhere.25 On these so-called letters of attestation, see chapter 5.

In the service, congregants assembled not around a table—as happened in the other congregations in our study—but before an altar. The liturgy followed the structure of the Catholic Mass, but the content of the sermons, prayers, psalms, and Bible readings was all clearly Protestant. During the distribution of the two forms of the Eucharist, Wesel’s pastors, dressed in clerical vestments, used an unleavened wafer instead of the ordinary bread that the Reformed elsewhere preferred.26 For a summary, see Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 41–42. The ritual, that is, in many ways looked like a standard Lutheran communion service. However, there are indications that the pastors tried their best to help the Reformed migrants feel more comfortable participating. The surviving liturgical handbook from St. Willibrord’s church includes a marginal note indicating alternative language that pastors might use to avoid conflict on the controversial question of the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. The original text, from the church ordinance of Württemberg, reads: “that You have nourished [gespeisst und getrenkt] us with the holy flesh and blood of Your only son.” The handwritten commentary on the side offers a possible substitute: “that You have nourished us with the holy sacrament of the body and blood of Your only son.”27 EKAW Gefach 21,1. Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 141. This more ambiguous language skipped right over the question of the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist. In 1578, the chief pastor at St. Willibrord’s also stopped using provocative language with regard to Christ’s presence in the bread and wine in a hymn sung by the congregation during the communion service.28 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 141. In addition, pastors granted Reformed communicants other options during the service to help ease their discomfort. Worshippers could choose whether to put the wafer in their mouths themselves, as the Reformed preferred, or to have the clergyman place it there, as Catholics and Lutherans practiced.29 EKAW Gefach 72,1 fol. 39r–v.

Only a few Reformed in Wesel proved unwilling to accept Wesel’s multiconfessional communion. In 1571, a group of Reformed migrants requested permission to hold separate communion services in a Reformed manner. The city council refused, citing the conflicts that had erupted in the early 1560s over just this issue, which brought “great unrest and no small amount of trouble.”30 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 73–74. This was the last time any Reformed Protestant ever tried to separate their “pure” Reformed eucharistic community from the larger civic ritual. After this, those who were unhappy with this state of affairs simply stayed home. Elders visited these truants to convince them to join with the rest. In January 1574, when questioned about his truancy, Thomas de Hoymaker explained that he doubted whether Christian discipline even existed if it did not apply “generally over the whole body of the congregation” [over het gansscher corpus der gemeynte].31 These three cases are also cited in Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 81. In 1578, Nicolas Muller, from Brussels, refused to attend the Lord’s Supper because he resented Wesel’s use of an unleavened wafer instead of ordinary table bread. Multiple threats of excommunication never convinced him to put aside his objections. Similarly, in 1580, Peter Hasevelt, from Aalst, also skipped communion because his conscience rejected “some ceremonies and adiaphoral practices used here.”

What’s interesting about these cases is that the Reformed elders—the very men who carefully monitored those under their discipline for sin and false belief—now worked tirelessly to ensure that the Lord’s Supper symbolized not only the purity of the true church but also a broad civic unity. Ironically, church discipline was working in reverse: elders utilized their power to excommunicate not just to protect the pure eucharistic community but also to compel individuals to participate in a sacrament they critiqued as impure. Of course, the subtext to this role reversal was the elders’ central concern to maintain the immigrants’ reputation and to keep criticisms of the local church that might threaten their welcome out of public notice.

The one case in which we see Dutch Reformed Protestants leaving Wesel to worship in another congregation comes from 1575. That year, Wesel’s elder Jan de Poerck, learned from Gillis Spaens, an elder in Rees, that some residents of Wesel had celebrated the Lord’s Supper in the smaller town some twenty-two kilometers downriver during the previous Pentecost. The matter went to the classis of Cleves, which promptly banned anyone from attending the Lord’s Supper in any congregation other than their own without express permission from their own consistory.32 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 7v. EKAW Gefach 12,5 fol. 10r. Simons, Synodalbuch, 513–14, 20–21. We never hear of such a violation again.

In a way, Reformed Protestants living in Wesel participated in two different forms of church (ecclesia) at the same time, one that was tied to the invisible community of saints and the other that reflected the sacral unity of the civic community. Wesel’s “church within a church” functioned for nearly half a century—nearly the entire time that the city served as a refugee center for Dutch Reformed Protestants.33 The system broke down fully in 1612. In 1598–99, too, during a Spanish occupation of Wesel, only Catholic services were permitted. Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 235. Evocative stories of violence committed by soldiers during this period can be found in Funke, “Religion and the Military.” The example of Wesel was more institutionally complicated than the practice of the Lord’s Supper in the other Dutch Reformed congregations in our study. And yet, in another way, it only confirms the pattern that, when it came to Holy Communion, Reformed migrants in the Holy Roman Empire only worshiped within their own congregations and did not travel to neighboring Reformed polities or reluctantly attend Catholic or Lutheran rites, as they so often did with rites of passage.