The Reformation
Exercise for Section One
A Sample Gloss
The text is "A Summary of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper", written by John Knox in 1550. Knox's style is clear and unadorned, so there isn't a lot that needs explaining. I will first give a quote from the source, followed by my gloss.
"…when he had prepared his spiritual banquet, he witnessed that he himself was the lively bread wherewith our souls are fed unto everlasting life."
Knox is distinguishing carefully how Christ is "present" in the bread. Throughout the Summary he speaks only of the bread, for the controversy applies equally to bread and wine. Here he refers to "his spiritual banquet" to emphasize that the Lord's Supper is about spriritual, not material, matters. He says Christ "himself was the lively bread", which puts the focus on Christ rather than on the bread.
"…he represents unto us, and makes plain to our senses, his heavenly gifts…"
That is, the bread is a representation of a thing and not the thing itself. It exists so that the spiritual compact is made "plain to our senses." In other words, it's for the simple humans who need plain representations.
"…the Lord calls us to remembrance…"
This is standard Protestant and especially Calvinist language. The Lord's Supper is commemorative, a remembrance, and not a sacred rite.
"…this sacrament ought to be come unto reverently…"
If the earlier phrase was in reference to the Catholics, this one's in reference to the radical Protestants, who were accused of not being properly solemn at the celebration of the Lord's Supper.
"…preserve his kirk." "kirk" = "church"
The final two paragraphs are the real meat of the Summary. Knox is saying that the Lord's Supper is completely irrelevant to the matter of salvation. More specifically, the whole argument, waged vehemently all across Christendom by 1550, over the precise nature of the presence of Christ in the bread and wine, was a false argument. It didn't matter. People were, according to Knox, focusing on the wrong end of the stick. What mattered was the presence of true faith in the heart of the participant, not what was going on with the bread and wine. In fact, no matter whether you held with transubstantiation or consubstantiation or no substantiation at all, you were saved or damned anyway on entirely other grounds.