Page History

Scanned PDF

Wiki MarkupIn interpreting the disagreements between Calvin and Bullinger over the . Lord's Supper, Gerrish says: "To Bullinger's tireless insistence that the Lord's
Supper is about remeluberingremembering, Calvin replies: '\[ say that in the "I say that in the Lord's Supper there is a remembrance of something present''' ("Calvin in Retrospect": 8).

The distinction Calvin implies, I take it, is that between remembering something past, or as past (presuluably Bullinger's view, or what Calvin takes to be his view) and remembering something present, or as present (Calvin's own view). But a problem with this distinction, obviously, is that memory ofany of any kind, by the very concept, can only be of something past that thereby, through being remembered, becomes something present. In other words, the question is not simply 7l1hether whether something remembered is past, or is remembered as past, or whether something remembered is present, or is remembered as present, since it is and has to be both insofar as it is remembered at all. The question, rather, is /taw how what is past becOlnes becomes present through being remembered: Does it thereby become present in its being in itself, then and there in the past, or does it thereby become present in its meaning for us, here and now in the present?

Even so, Calvin, in his way, clearly seenlS seems to be trying to express something analogous to the distinction I make between the elupiricalempirical-historical Jesus and the existential-historical Jesus.

Other ways of working on the same distinction are Bultmann's, when he argues that "_\[d\]ie echte Form del' Vel'gegem.vlil'tigungder Vergegenwärtigung_ des geschichtlichen Faktums Jesus ist ... nicht die historische Erinnerung und Rekonstruktion, sondern _die VerkundigungVerkündigung_" (_Glauben lindund Verstehen_, 1:146); and Knox's, when he discusses the church's memory of Jesus by distinguishing, however confusingly and confusedly, between "the facts of Jesus' career," or "facts about him or his life," on the one hand, and "Jesus himself," or "the man himself," on the other (_The Church and the Reality Realih)of ofChristChrist: 47,50,52_; cf. also Notebooks, 25 January 1997; and 19 July 2006).

13 April 2010