This paper examines and compares how Augustine and Calvin are similar and different in their scriptural interpretation of 1 Cor 16-17 on the teaching of unity. Augustine’s Sermon 227 was preached on Easter Day of ca. 414-415, in which he explained the meaning of Eucharist following the thought of Paul in 1 Cor 10:16–17: “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.” (1 Cor 10:16-17) In Augustine, he targets on the relationship sign-signaled relationship between the loaf of bread and body of Christ; he did not argue for real essential change of the Eucharist bread into body of Christ or the cup (wine) into the blood of Christ[1] but instead focus on the unity of the body of Christ, His church: He asserts that bread is “one loaf, one body, is what we all are, many though we be. In this loaf of bread you are given clearly to understand how much you should love unity.”[2] Similar to Augustine, John Calvin, when he focuses on the theme of unity as he interprets 1 Cor 10:17: “[Paul] mentions this by the way, that the Corinthians may understand that we must, even by external profession, maintain that unity which subsists between us and Christ, inasmuch as we all assemble together to receive the symbol of that sacred unity. In this second part of the statement, he makes mention only of the one part of the Sacrament, and it is the manner of Scripture to describe by Synecdoche.”[3] This paper will show, however, that the rhetoric movement of Augustine and Calvin are different: Augustine uses the image of the constituents of bread and wine—that is, grain and grapes respectively —to bring the readers from the unity in Christ to the unity with Christ. On the other hand, Calvin draws the rhetoric top-down, from the unity with Christ (through the sanctified identity of the Church) to the unity in Christ (the communal participation, koinonia, among the members within the Church)
[1] Even though Augustine says the bread is the body of Christ and the cup is the blood of Christ in Sermon 272, Augustine’s eucharistic theology could be interpreted spiritually is obvious because the context is a classical sign-signaled pair See Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, 25-27. See R. Zeli, “Augustine on the Real & Substanitial Presence,”
Sola Symbolica – The 6th Sola of Protestantism, https://solasymbolic.wordpress.com/2021/12/31/augustine-on-the-real-substanitial-presence/.
[2] Saint Augustine, “Sermon 227” in Sermons 184–229Z on the Liturgical Seasons, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Edmund Hill, vol. 6, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1993), 242–243.
[3] John Calvin and John Pringle, Commentaries on the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 336–337.