489. In interpreting the disagreements between Calvin and Bullinger . . .

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In 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 remembering, Calvin replies: "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 (presumably 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 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 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 how what is past 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 seems to be trying to express something analogous to the distinction I make between the empirical-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 der Vergegenwärtigung des geschichtlichen Faktums Jesus ist . . . nicht die historische Erinnerung und Rekonstruktion, sondern die Verkündigung" (Glauben und 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 of Christ: 47,50,52; cf. also Notebooks, 25 January 1997; and 19 July 2006).

13 April 2010