When it came to agreeing on the sixth sub-point, whether Christ is bodily present in the elements, the most distinguished minds of Protestantism slammed into an insurmountable obstacle.  While Zwingli and the Reformed representatives viewed the issue of Christ’s presence as a non-essential doctrine, Luther’s intransigence and his insistence that it is an essential guaranteed that there was no substantive final agreement at the colloquy.

There is an episode from Luther’s life in which he played a prominent role.  It is not a story with a happy ending, but we should be familiar with the Marburg Colloquy because it holds important lessons for the Reformed community today.

In the middle of the 1520s, key Protestants desired a political alliance between the Lutheran and Reformed (the non-Lutheran reformers in Switzerland and Strasbourg) bodies in order to bolster the reform movement and to present a united front against Rome, which had been mounting increasingly aggressive military efforts to counter the gains made by the Protestants.  To accomplish this, a meeting of the key players from both parties was sponsored by the ardent Protestant prince, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse.  His intent was to have the principals discuss and resolve their differences so that a confederation that was political as well as religious could be formed.

Zwingli had been in favor of such a détente, but Luther doubted the prospects for success and so hesitated to participate.  Despite holding many theological views in common, the Lutheran and the Reformed parties experienced a significant stalemate over the Lord’s Supper, which had played out in a rancorous and vitriolic literary debate between Lutheran and Reformed theologians in the years preceding the Marburg Colloquy.  In fact, Luther believed that since both sides were so entrenched and that neither could marshal new arguments or would change their mind, the results of the colloquy might be worse than the current impasse.

Yet the two parties met at the Landgrave’s Marburg castle in central Germany in October 1529.  Luther and Melanchthon headed the Lutheran delegation, and the Reformed side included Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and Bucer.

The first-hand accounts show that while the discussions were often tense and at times acrimonious, the parties were able to agree on fourteen points, which included the persons of the Trinity, original sin, faith, justification, confession, and baptism.  When they came to the fifteenth (and last) point, the Lord’s Supper, the two sides were even able to agree on five of six sub-points regarding the Supper, some of which included that it was instituted by Christ, that the laity should be given both the bread and the cup, and that the Supper in the mass cannot secure grace for someone else.

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