Back to your main point–
There are basically three Protestant views on the Real presence:
- The Lutheran view, that Christ is corporeally present in the bread and wine. The bread and wine are not turned into something else, but coexist with the Body and Blood much as Christ’s divinity and humanity coexist.
- The Zwinglian view, which is probably held by most Protestants, at least in the U.S. In fact many Protestants would have less conception of a sacramental presence than Zwingli did. For Zwingli, the Eucharist is a memorial of Christ’s death, a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, and a sign of Christ’s presence in the worshipping community.
- The “Calvinist” view (though Bucer and others held it before him). This is the most slippery and complex of the three positions, and it occupies a vague middle ground between the other two. There are really a number of positions that can be put in this category. But basically the “Calvinist” view is best expressed by saying that believers receive the glorified Body and Blood of Christ in the act of receiving the bread and wine of the Eucharist. This can be put in a form that is almost Zwinglian (just as we receive the bread and wine so we spiritually receive the Body and Blood) or a form that is almost Lutheran or even Thomistic (Christ is really present in the Eucharist in a heavenly manner that we cannot express in normal human language). As OSL has been saying, the Wesley brothers definitely held this view, and high-church Methodists today follow in this tradition, though probably the majority of Methodists lean more toward Zwinglianism. I myself think that any view from the “Calvinist” to the Thomistic is a legitimate expression of what Scripture and the early Church teach about the Eucharist.
Here is Charles Wesley’s great Eucharistic hymn “O the Depth of Love Divine,” which expresses the "Calvinist view at its best:
O the depth of love divine, the unfathomable grace!
Who can say how bread and wine God into us conveys!
How the bread his flesh imparts, how the wine transmits his blood,
Fills the faithful people’s hearts with all the life of God.
Let the wisest mortals show how we the grace receive;
Feeble elements bestow a power not theirs to give.
Who explains the wondrous way, how through these the virtue came?
These the virtue did convey, yet still remain the same.
How can spirits heavenward rise, by earthly matter fed,
Drink herewith divine supplies and eat immortal bread?
Ask the Father’s wisdom how; Christ who did the means ordain;
Angels round our altars bow to search it out, in vain.
Sure and real is the grace, the manner be unknown;
Only meet us in thy ways and perfect us in one.
Let us taste the heavenly powers, Lord, we ask for nothing more.
Thine to bless, ‘tis only ours to wonder and adore.
I have to assume, for example, that there was some doctrine that went beyond a specific care for the poor and miners that led Methodists to establish a separation from Anglicans, for example?
Actually no. English Methodists separated from the Church of England after John Wesley’s death (though he did register their meeting houses as dissenting chapels, because the C of E wouldn’t authorize them and this was the only way they could be legal), not because of a doctrinal conflict but simply because the Church of England had refused to accept Methodists as a legitimate movement. Gradually, in the early 19th century, Methodists began celebrating the Eucharist in their own chapels and holding services at times that conflicted with Anglican services, and this constituted the real transition from a “society” to a separate church.
American Methodists never separated from the Anglicans in any direct way. Anglicanism was in disarray after the Revolution, and the Church of England refused to consecrate bishops who would not take an oath to the monarch. Methodists solved this problem (1784) by establishing their own church without episcopal succession. Three years later, the Protestant Episcopal Church was founded with a line of bishops consecrated by the Scottish Episcopal Church (which was at this point in schism from Canterbury). Methodism and Episcopalianism are really parallel successor churches to Anglicanism. Neither split from the other, and Methodists actually organized as an independent national church three years before Episcopalians did. Methodists and Episcopalians considered uniting early on, but the Methodists were too attached to Wesley and his way of doing things for the Episcopalians’ liking.
In neither England nor America (Scotland and Ireland are different cases again) was there any major doctrinal conflict, although there were different doctrinal emphases, and the gaps between the two widened after the Anglo-Catholic movement transformed Anglicanism in a more Catholic direction.
Edwin
