Identity

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the divide between Christian traditions that understand “this is my body” as true in the proper sense (what George Hunsinger calls “real predication”) and those that do not. It traces the development of this divide to the Western eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century. The author argues that both Roman Catholics and Lutherans (on one side) and Swiss Reformers and the Radical Reformation (on the other) shared an assumption that language must be either literal or figurative, with only the former adequate for proper truth claims. The author also analyzes the eucharistic controversy between Luther, who understood “is” as an example of literal predication, and Zwingli, who saw it as a rhetorical trope and thus not properly true. The chapter concludes by arguing that a cognitive understanding of language can transcend this dichotomy since figurative language can indeed be capable of proper truth claims.