Confessing Evangelical

Josh has an interesting item on the Lord's Supper. The Reformed doctrine of the Lord's Supper seems to have quite a short half-life, decaying quickly, in practice, into a form of Zwinglianism. This is the case not only in church history but also on the level of individual experience, at least in my own case - as I've said before, I tended to find that the Reformed doctrine (the clearest expression of which can probably be found in the Heidelberg Catechism, qq75-79) sorta made sense whenever I read it, but then faded away the moment I looked away, so that the Lord's Supper became a constant struggle to try to "really 'get' the significance of 'it', this time". I think Josh hits the nail on the head as to why this was the case:

Hence my criticism of the Reformed doctrine is not so much that it devalues the Supper or rob it of its efficacy, it is that it completely dispenses with the theological and exegetical reason for the value and efficacy. In other words, they believe in the effects of the Real Presence, but not the Presence itself, and further confuse the Presence with its effects. This is why unless the Reformed recover the orthodox doctrine of the consecrated bread and wine, they're doomed to repeat history: the entire reason that Calvin's doctrine of the Supper had no staying power in Protestantism is that when one is unable to confess "This is the true body of Christ," one no longer has any convincing reason to believe that eating this bread and drinking this cup have any more effect than to call forth Christ's sacrifice to the mind and produce some kind of solidarity based on the shared memory.

For another - complementary rather than alternative - explanation for the instability of Calvin's doctrine of the Lord's Supper, see my earlier post on God's Sovereignty and God's Sacraments, especially the article on Revd McCain's blog which I link from that post.