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SEMPER REFORMANDA SAVE Previous Essay Next Essay Table of Contents

The Sacrament of the Altar

A Book on the Lutheran Doctrine of the Lord's Supper

Preface to the English Edition

I wish to express my gratitude to the Reverend Dr. Robert D. Preus,

president of Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, who
has made it possible for this book to reach its readers. I also thank
Mr. Edward L. Rye,
Stockholm, who made the first translation of the
manuscript, the final version of which I myself have gone through.

The Rev. Professor Dr. Hermann Sasse, North Adelaide, South

Australia, had helped me from the very beginning of my career as a
scholar. He rejoiced at the news of a future English edition of my
book, but he did not live to see it. To
the memory of my beloved
Hermann Sasse I dedicate this book.

Tom G. Hardt

No part of this document is to be further published or disseminated

by any means without the express permission of Erling T. Teigen, 314
Pearl St., Mankato MN 56001 (e-mail: 74022.2447@Compuserve.com ).

- CHAPTERS -

I. The Sacrament Is Founded On Scripture Alone

II. The Sacrament Is The True Body Of Christ

III. The Sacrament Does Not Coincide With The Omnipresence Of The Body Of Christ

IV. The Sacrament Means That Real Bread Is The Body of Christ

V. The Sacrament Is Achieved By The Reading Of The Words Of Institution

VI. The Sacrament Is The Body And Blood Of Christ--Not The Whole Christ

VII. The Sacrament Is Adorable And Extended In Time

VIII. The Sacrament Is A Means Of Grace

I. The Sacrament Is Founded On Scripture Alone

The Christian doctrine of the Lord's Supper is sometimes treated on the

basis of ideas derived from the field of the psychology of religion.
The doctrines of the various denominations are, in such cases,
categorized in such a way that
belief in the Sacrament as the body and
blood of Christ is considered characteristic of what is termed the
Catholic type of religion, which seeks support for its belief in the
tradition of the church, in the darkness of cathedrals, and in its
devotion to the host. The teaching that the Sacrament is a symbol, mere
bread and wine, is deemed to be part of the Protestant type of
religion, with its belief in Scripture alone, a puritanical absence of
tradition, and concentration on
personal religion. It is probably
correct to assume that, even within the bounds of conservative
Lutheranism today, many an adherent of the doctrine of the Real
Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament looks more or
less in that way at the foundation of his faith. He finds it absurd to
think that Scripture alone is the basis of belief in the Real Presence.
People like this want safer ground under their feet: Mother Church,
which has always taught the
Real Presence. An affirmation of the Real
Presence founded on traditionalism should be confronted with a reminder
that this is dogmatically a very vulnerable position. During the
Reformation, Luther's friend and helper, Philip
Melanchthon, was
brought to waver in his faith about the Holy Presence, when he studied
the opponents' lists of quotations from the fathers of the church and
saw how confusing the testimony of the ancient church on the Sacrament
could sometimes be.

At the famous disputation between Luther and his Reformed antagonist,

Ulrich Zwingli, at Marburg in 1529, this appeal to the ancient church
was made in a modest way when Zwingli pointed out that a certain
latitude of views
existed among the church fathers, and that that state
of affairs could make it possible for Luther and Zwingli to commune at
the same altar. In a touching appeal, Zwingli asks Luther for the hand
of fellowship across the different
interpretations of Jesus' words at
the first celebration of the Lord's supper. That hand is turned away by
Luther, who, through references to the possibly divergent opinions of
tradition, was never brought to hesitate, unlike
Melanchthon,
concerning the Real Presence and its exclusive claims to be true. What
matters to Luther also here is what Scripture, the Bible alone,
testifies. In his lectures on the Psalms held in 1532, Luther states
that we stick to
Christ's words about the Sacrament without questioning
them, preferring them to any and all human views and evaluations, even
those of the ancient church.1
This does not mean that the sometimes careless way the Reformed used
quotations from the fathers was indulgently allowed to pass. In other
contexts, Luther, on exactly this point, could prove that the Reformed
misunderstood the texts of the fathers.2 But what is important is the fact that Luther, in
principle, did not accept dependence on anything but Scripture.

Luther dealt frequently with the problem which confronts us here. False
institutionalism at the expense of the truth, a characteristic of the
church of councils and decretals, had resulted in neglect of the
purpose of the exegesis of
Scripture with its necessarily exclusive
alternatives of true or false. Such exegesis had been replaced with a
vague faith operating within patristic quotations of desirable
elasticity. The Evil Power infused into Christendom the notion
that not
everything had been revealed to the apostles, that Scripture was
insufficient as the only rule of faith, since, after all, its content
was subject to dispute. Thus the church was referred to the fathers.
But such faith becomes a loose
faith with a vague profile, marked by
the will to stick together within indefinite boundary lines, rather
than by the Biblical passion for truth, which is a battle fought for
God himself. This is what happened to the Father's plans: since
they
wanted to have Scripture without fights and struggles, they became the
cause of leaving Scripture entirely and ending up in purely human
speculations. Then all disunity and all dispute about Scripture ceased
indeed, but that was
a divine struggling, God fighting with the Devil,
as St. Paul says in Ephesians 6:12: "For we wrestle not against flesh
and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against rulers
of the darkness of this world."3
What happened
at that time is going to happen again after Luther's
death: the apocalyptic finale which Luther describes prophetically,
turns out to be an institutionalizing which forms a parallel to that of
the papacy. Desperatio veritatis will reign, he
says, a despair about the truth which makes us get tired of Scripture and of trusting it,4
while the eagerness to observe human statutes will be all the greater.
These factors alone will be what holds together that church which is
without
faith and without Scripture.

In the controversies about the Sacrament, Luther finds among his

adversaries just such a general vagueness; he does not find primarily a
doctrine which runs contrary to his own. Their unwillingness to debate
on the basis of Scripture
leads to their being satisfied with making
faces and using arguments such as "This is unspiritual." In the
controversy itself, his enemies reveal an incomprehensible softness, a
timidity that does not come from God: They operate with a
weak, timid
conscience.5
These critical words which Luther voiced well suit the peculiar laxity
which we can see in Zwingli, despite his indisputable eloquence. In one
of his books, Zwingli admits that he had not carefully read
Luther's
latest book. Nonetheless, he undertakes its refutation. A friend of his
had informed him of the contents of Luthers book while they were going
for a walk. This conversation had to serve as compensation for the
deficiencies in
Zwingli's study of Luther.6
The reason for this dogmatical disinterest is, as Luther accurately
observes, the fact that his adversaries operate on the basis of two
general principles given by natural religions. These principles make
any
and all discussions about individual Bible verses superfluous.
These two principles, which raise the Christian from the myopia of
Bible study, are the following: first, the Real Presence is not of any
use, viz.; it cannot be proved that
the Real Presence is a necessary
part of the doctrine of justification; secondly, the Real Presence is
unworthy of God, for God neither can nor should be locked up in a
little piece of bread and, even less, be given to the godless or even
fall on the floor.7

Luther very carefully analyzed these two cardinal errors of his

opponent, especially the first. This means that in the battle for the
Lord's Supper which Luther carried on through the entire course of his
theological career, he explicitly
condemned and anathematized the basic
theory of modern Luther research and of the modern Luther renaissance.
This basic theory is often worded in roughly the following way: Never
think that you have grasped one of Luther's
teachings until you have
reached the point where you can trace it back to the forgiveness of
sins. Often with the unmistakable tones of pulpit oratory, the doctrine
of the Real Presence is, in such cases, traced back to the
psychological
necessity of a concrete meeting with God in order to
uphold fellowship with Christ. On all levels of modern theology, we run
up against this attitude to Luther's material. In the reader or hearer
the impression is necessarily created that
either Luther was guilty of
a grossly, monotonous schematic-thinking in dealing with the words of
Scripture or that the modern research scholar reveals such a defect in
dealing with Luther. Concerning this systematic motivation for
the
articles of faith, and for the doctrine of the Real Presence in
particular, Luther himself says: If they [his opponents] had tolerable
insights into the faith, and had at any time felt a spark of faith,
they would know that the highest and
the sole virtue of faith is that
faith does not seek to know why that which is believed in is of use or
why it is necessary. For faith does not wish to set up borders for God
or call upon Him to render account as to why, for what purpose,
and for
what necessary reason He commands a thing. Faith would rather be
foolish, give God the honor and believe His mere word.8
The question itself is the work of the Devil: In like manner our mother
Eve also had God's word for
it that she was not to eat of one
particular tree. Then the enthusiast's false god came to her and said:
Why did God give such a command as that, as if he meant: What is the
use of this? Why should this be necessary?9

At Marburg Castle this decisive difference with regard to Christian

revelation became manifest during the talks between Zwingli and Luther.
In his first speech against Luther, Zwingli says: And finally you
yourself concede that the
spiritual eating [in accordance with John 6]
gives consolation. And since we are in agreement on this major point, I
ask you for the sake of the love of Christ not to accuse anyone of
heresy on account of this difference [about the
Sacrament]. The fathers
did not condemn one another rashly, even if they were not in agreement.10
In Zwingli's view this major point, faith's eating, about which the
parties agree, makes bodily eating unnecessary: When we now
have the
spiritual eating, what is the use of bodily eating?11
Again and again, Luther's opponents emphasize the fact that the Real
Presence lacks systematic support in the doctrine of justification.
However, Luther makes no attempt to
produce any such pious explanation.
Instead he summarizes his views in one monumental sentence which is so
important, that it can be said to surpass his triumphant words, "This
is my body," which Luther had written on the table
with chalk. This
sentence of Luther's, which makes it possible to believe in the words
This is my body, reads: Every article of faith is in itself its own principle and requires no proof by means of another one.12

Luther gives us an extensive explanation of this sentence. Your

argument is built up like this: Because we have a spiritual eating [by
faith], bodily eating [of the body of Christ in the Sacrament] is not
needed. I answer: we do not by
any means deny the spiritual eating;
indeed we teach and believe all over that this is necessary, but that
does not prove that the bodily eating is not necessary or superfluous.
I do not search for an answer to the question if it is
necessary or
not. That is not our business. It is written: "Take, eat, this is my
body" and thus one absolutely must so do and believe. One must, one
must . . . . If He commanded me to eat mud, I would do so. I would do
so because I
know more than well it is for my benefit. The servant
should not quibble about his Lord's will. One must close one's eyes.
The benefit Luther confesses he believes in is here, in principle, none
other than the benefit which consists of
obedience to the will of God,
which we can never penetrate. That will can never be made the object of
scrutiny according to some pattern. Oekolampadius, Zwingli's co-worker
answered Luther and said "Where is it written, Herr
Doktor, that we are
to go through Scripture with our eyes closed?" In saying these words,
what he attacks is not a paradoxical Biblicism which persists in
maintaining untenable positions for the sake of offence. He attacks
scientific
exegesis which definitely refuses to force upon the Bible
justification by faith as a systematic, straight-jacket principle
governing interpretation and which instead has no other aim but to let
the material speak: I abide with my text.13

The words must be heard in their naked form, Luther says repeatedly
after the Marburg talks: "And even if it were such an insignificant
sacrament that it gave me no benefit and was unnecessary so that
neither grace nor help were
given in it, [even if] it were merely God's
command and law requiring us to use it, by virtue of this divine power
which we are bound to subject ourselves to and obey, this would, on
account of this covenant, compel and invite us not
to despise it or
deem it a superfluous or a lowly thing, but rather to use it diligently
with earnest and in faithful obedience and to honor it highly, since
nothing can be greater or more wonderful than what God bids and
commands by
His Word."14

The concentration on obedience to God without would-be-pious looks to

the left and right for personal consolation and needs for salvation
does not, of course, mean that Luther in any sense wanted to deny that
the Sacrament gives
grace. We shall deal with that in another chapter.
But the conviction that the Sacrament is a means of grace does not have
its place in the interpretation of Jesus' words about bread and wine.
What is decisively characteristic of Luther
and of all truly Christian
theology is the fact that the doctrine can be put forth in the form of
a loci i.e. arranged in such a way that each doctrine in principle is
prescribed by itself, independent of other doctrines. Luther's
pronounced
admiration for Melanchthon's Loci15
shows that he considered this system exemplary. The reason why Luther
did not publish a similar little book for young people was merely
because he lacked pedagogical skill, as he himself says.
The contempt
which many modern theologians, and especially modern Luther scholars,
show towards the loci method is based on the notion that
justification by faith is the threshing floor of faith, and on the
conception of Luther's
religion as one single eruptive outbreak of one
single experience of a psychological nature, which has to be found in
everything Luther ever said.

In this context it can also be said that Luther's view that the
articles of faith are not interdependent, is also reflected in his
conviction that soul-murdering heresy can never be defined as limited
to the rejection of the central articles on
salvation. Stubborn
rejection of the miracle of the Sacrament leads to damnation when
correct instruction has been given. He that makes God into a liar in
one of His Words and blasphemes or says that it is unimportant if He is
blasphemed and made out to be a liar, blasphemes God in His entirety
and considers all blasphemy a trifling thing.16
"They are bound over to punishment and 'sin unto death' as St. John
says. About their leaders I speak; the poor
people subjected to them
may our good Lord Jesus help out of the hands of these murderers of
souls. They, I say, have received frequent exhortation."17
"They console themselves, I am told, with the fact that they write a
lot of books
and that they are very busy in the church and with
Scripture. To what avail? They adulterate the Word of God and His
Sacrament and they do not want to listen. But he that does not hear God
will in turn not be heard by Him; 'his
prayer shall be abomination,'
Prov. 28:[9]."18 That is why
Luther, as a servant of Christ, pronounces condemnation over those who
have condemned themselves. This condemnation does not take a detour via
a conclusion that denial
of the Real Presence would logically lead to
other, even worse heresies. Such demonic logic does indeed exist, and
Luther points this out. But this is not what gives such great weight to
Luther's powerful anathema against Zwingli and
those who consciously
dishonor the Sacrament. "And even if they boast that they believe in
this article about the person of Christ and talk about it a lot, don't
believe that. They lie in everything they say about this. With their
mouths
they do indeed say so (just as the demons in the Gospel call the
Lord the Son of God) but 'their hearts are from me,' Matt. 15:8. That
is certain. Just as the Jews swore by the living God, but their talk
was false, the prophet says.... For
it is certain that he does not
rightly believe in an article of faith (after having been exhorted and
instructed), he does not believe in any one article with the right
earnest and faith."19 Here we see the background for the solemn
damnamus,
we condemn, contained in the Lutheran Confessions in their doctrinal
articles following the usage of the synodical decrees of the ancient
church. Here the confessions, like Luther, distinguish between seducers
and the
seduced: "However, it is not our purpose and intention to mean
thereby those persons who err ingenuously and who do not blaspheme the
truth of the divine Word, and far less do we mean entire churches
inside or outside the Holy
Empire of the German Nation. On the
contrary, we mean specifically to condemn only false and seductive
doctrines and their stiff-necked proponents and blasphemers."20
"The ban is thus directed not against the many pious,
innocent people
...[who] go their way in the simplicity of their hearts, do not
understand the issues and take no pleasure in blasphemies against the
Holy Supper as it is celebrated in our churches according to Christ's
institution and as
we concordantly teach about it on the basis of the
words of His testament. It is furthermore to be hoped that when they
are rightly instructed in this doctrine, they will, through the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, turn to the infallible truth
of the divine
Word and unite with us and our churches and schools."21
Nevertheless, despite all this tender feeling towards the simple people
who, during Holy Week 1525 had to say good-bye to Jesus Christ in the
Holy Sacrament of
the cloister church of Zurich22 the whole sharpness of real Biblical curse remains against those who knew their Lord's will and did not act according to it.

For Luther, that explicit will of God is to be found clearly and

unambiguously in Jesus' declaration at the first celebration that the
bread and wine in this meal are the body and blood of Jesus. Also the
heathen of ancient days as well as
the Jews, who for centuries have
accompanied Christianity with constant criticism against, among other
things, the Sacrament, have all, through their accusations of
cannibalism, confirmed this circumstance common both to faith and
to
unbelief, to wit, that the Christians' Sacred Meal takes place by
virtue of words which declare that bread and wine are Jesus body and
blood.23
A Jew or Turk who denies the truth of revelation must nonetheless find
that Christian
faith is just precisely the Real Presence.24
The fact that Luther was involved in polemics about the Sacrament
should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Luther always considered
the doctrine of the Real presence easy.

In this respect, Luther gets unexpected support from his opponents who
concede that the factual wording of the words of institution would seem
to teach the Real Presence. This is, they think, the low and carnal
meaning, which he
who is spiritual elevates to the spiritual level
required by generally valid, systematic norms. It is here that the many
well-known symbolic interpretations, which often contradict one
another, come in. For Luther, however, this flight
away from the
obvious and self-evident remains an unnatural thing, and it is for him
unnatural that his opponents thus admit that they have corroboration
for their views, not in the text, but somewhere else.25
Perhaps Luther's
strongest argument against a symbolic interpretation
of the Sacrament is the one in which he wonders how the Reformed think
Christ should have expressed Himself to teach the Real Presence, if
that was what he wanted to do. By
virtue of the principles established
by the opponents, they can turn every expression into symbolism. This
excludes the Real presence a priori so completely, that even the linguistic means of expressing even a hypothetical Real
Presence have been blown to pieces.26

This allegorizing by principle has, Luther says, also other, equally

catastrophic effects, e.g., the transformation of the account of
creation to a symbolic understanding. Christianity could thus be
compelled to adapt itself to heathen
philosophy and natural science,
teaching like Aristotle and Pliny that the world is eternal and that
there never was any such thing as the first human being named Adam.27 This would seem to be the inevitable result of a spiritual
interpretation of the words of institution.

Luther asks his opponents just where the allegorical nature of the
words of institution is supposed to have been proclaimed. Of course,
Luther knows of a vast number of parables in Scripture. But in all of
these it is clearly said that
they are parables, either in such a way
that it is directly stated that a parable is to follow, or by
clarification through other passages of Scripture. For instance, it is
made clear that Christ is not a botanical vine, but the God-Man who is
thus to be considered a spiritual vine: "I am the true vine" (John
15:1).28
In connection with the institution of the Sacrament, there is no
proclamation given to the effect that the Supper is a parable. Since
Scripture contains no further
interpretation of the Sacrament, the
words of institution stand alone without intermediaries. For this
reason they must be taken literally. Of course, this does presuppose
that Scripture as such is intended to be understood and that the
person
speaking is not some whimsical person whose words and actions are
incoherent, some kind of person who, without premeditation just throws
out statements with a veiled meaning. A sterling summary of that
attitude is found
in the Lutheran Confessions which dwell on the
circumstance that Jesus in this sad, last hour of his life...selected
his words with great deliberation and care in ordaining and instituting
this most venerable sacrament. These words are
Jesus last words, His
will and testament, filled with consideration and the desire for
clarity. This is a Sacrament which was to be observed with great
reverence and obedience until the end of the world Jesus knows that the
eyes of all
the faithful, until the end of the world, are directed at
His lips that night.29 That is
why Jesus spoke so unambiguously. He is the unambiguous God who already
in the days of the Old Testament was a God of clarity. There is, of
course, no more faithful or trustworthy interpreter of the words of
Jesus Christ than the Lord Christ himself, who best understands his
words and heart and intention and is best qualified, from the
standpoint of wisdom and
intelligence, to explain them. In the
institution of his last will and testament and of his abiding covenant
and union, he uses no flowery language but the most appropriate,
simple, indubitable, and clear words, just as he does in all
articles
of faith and in the institution of other covenant-signs and signs of
grace or sacraments, such as circumcision, the many kinds of sacrifice
in the Old Testament, and Holy Baptism.30
The ministers of the new testament standing
before the altar are guided
by directives that are no less clear and unambiguous than those given
to Aaron before the mercy seat. In both testaments, God's servants are
to take God at His words.

With the above we have stated the most essential things about Luther's
interpretation of the words of institution. A closer study of his
refutation of the Reformed symbolism leads to the polemics he was
forced to engage in. His
arguments there are an overabundance, not
prerequisites for achieving certainty as to the real meaning of the
words of institution. It is not necessary to know all about those
controversies in order to have met what convinced Luther of
the gift of
the Sacrament of the Altar. Provided that this is kept in our thoughts,
a few of the arguments Luther used in this context will be taken up
here. For instance, Luther points out that if the symbolic
interpretation, according to
which the bread is not Christ's body, was
correct, Jesus words, "This is my body," would be a sentence without
any meaning at all. The words, "Take, eat, do this in remembrance of
me," would give the entire content of the whole
Sacrament.31
Furthermore, Luther wonders what sense the sentence, to the effect that
the bread signifies the body, is supposed to have. What he demands is
not the demand of systematic theology for a Real Presence. He demands
that
Jesus' words must be sensible, must make sense. Why would the
Church until the end of the world have to be informed of such a flat
allegory?32 Where, by the way,
does the resemblance and similarity between bread and the body of
Christ lie? The Passover had an evident resemblance to Christ being
slaughtered for the salvation of many. What reason would there be to
replace this splendid sacrament of symbolism with the plain and
incomprehensible bread
symbol?33
The similarity cannot be found in the very action of the Sacrament (the
breaking), because the explanatory words refer to the elements present,
not to an act.34 Above all,
Scripture says that the body of Christ was not
broken. The chalice, the
content of which was not poured out in parallel with the breaking of
the bread, has even less similarity of any kind.35
Luther also shows that the breaking of bread is a common action when
bread is eaten and
lacks symbolical significance. Thus all speculation
about the breaking of the bread was once and for all disposed of within
Lutheranism. By the way, it not only lacks foundation in Scripture, but
also support in the ancient church.36

Luther naturally concedes that there are cases of a symbolical use of

language in the Bible. Vine means, in accordance with a common, simple,
linguistic usage, a certain kind of plant; but in symbolic usage (tropus)
it means
something else. "I am the vine," thus means that the usual
word, vine, is given a higher dignity and means a spiritual vine,
Christ the life-giver. In the expression "The seed is the Word of God,"
it is shown that seed in the parable was
used as a new word,
designating spiritual seed, the Gospel which bears fruit. In all such
cases the usual word receives a higher dignity: the tropus word
does not, of course, point back to the old word. Reformed symbolism
would,
however, create the strange situation that the concept "my body"
in the words of institution would get the meaning sign for my body,
i.e., it would be given a lower dignity and point back to a reality
which was more full. This goes
entirely against Scripture's form of
symbol words.37 However, all
such reasoning is and remains completely superfluous. No one can prove
that the Sacrament is symbolic and that the words should be taken in
any other sense than in
their usual, everyday, literal meaning.

Every closer study of the symbolic interpretation of the Reformed shows

that what faces us is a flight from facts. The different exegetical
details in their interpretations are derived from easily accessible,
general principles taken from
the legacy of spiritualism which, like a
shadow, has followed Christianity throughout history. Faced with the
Biblical fact that the body and blood of the Creator, sacrificed and
smitten, rest on the Christian altar, there arises in every
age a
spontaneous protest, formulated by Zwingli: The soul eats "spirit and
therefore it does not eat meat."38
A modern Reformed scholar has commented on Zwingli's words
apologetically: This is not flat rationalism, but rather a
testimony of
how the Spirit is tied to God (Gottesverbundenheit des Geistes).39
Perhaps one could agree, but then it must be stressed that it is not a
matter of flat rationalism in the sense of atheism. However, what does
occur in
Zwingli is a pious rationalism which, in Luther's eyes, is a
greater enemy of the Biblical truth than heathen rationalism, which
must admit the unambiguity of the words of institution.

1 WA 40:3, 32, 28 (etiam vaeteris ecclesiae).

2 WA 23:129.4ff., 109.29 ff., 219.22ff. (LW 37:109f, 125, 146).

3 WA 23:67.34ff. (LW 37:15).

4 WA 23:71.3 ff. (LW 37:17).

5 WA 23:73.10. (LW 37:19).

6 Walther Koehler, Zwingli und Luther I, Leipzig 1924, 646, 652.

7 WA 19:486.10 ff., WA 23:157.26 ff. (LW 36:338; LW 37:70).

8 WA 23:249.22ff. (LW 37:128).

9 WA 23:249.37ff. (LW 37:129).

10 Walther Koehler, "Marburger Religionsgespraech," Schriften des Vereins fuer Reformationsgeschichte, 48/1, Leipzig 1929, 7. Most easily accessible is the Marburg Colloquy in Herman Sasse, This is my Body, Minneapolis, 1959,
215-272, 2nd ed. Adelaide, 1976,173-220.

11 Koehler, "Marburger Religionsgespraech," 13.

12 Koehler, "Marburger Religionsgespraech," 34.

13 Koehler, "Marburger Religionsgespraech," 13.

14 WA 30ii:601.7ff. (LW 38:104).

15 WA TR 5:5511.

16 WA 23:85.1ff. (LW 37:26).

17 WA 54:148.21ff. (LW 38:296).

18 WA 54:155.9ff. (LW 38:303).

19 WA 54:158.14ff. (LW 38:308ff).

20 The Book of Concord, ed. Theodore A. Tappert, Philadelphia 1959, 11, (Preface).

21 Tappert, 118.

22 Sasse, This is my Body, 132, 2nd ed., 105.

23 WA 26:406.27ff. (LW 37:272).

24 WA 26:496.34ff. (LW 37:359).

25 WA 26:445.20ff. (LW 37:304), WA 26:270.18ff. (LW 37.168).

26 WA 26:452.35ff., 451.21ff., 447.14ff. (LW 37:309, 306).

27 WA 23:91.10ff., 26:406.20ff. (LW 37:30; LW 37:272).

28 WA 23:103.15ff., 26:275.21ff. (LW 37:38, 174f.).

29 Tappert, 577 (SD VII, 44).

30 Tappert, 578 (SD VII, 50).

31 WA 26:389.31ff. (LW 37:261).

32 WA 26:390,.23ff. (LW 37:262).

33 WA 26:395.18ff. (LW 37:264).

34 WA 26:391.26ff. (LW 37:262).

35 WA 26:398.1ff. (LW 37:266).

36 WA 26:397.21ff., Die deutsche Thomas-Ausgabe, Summa Theologiae, 30:467 (LW 37:266).

37 WA 26:380.20ff. (LW 37:253f.).

38 Koehler, "Marburger Religionsgespraech," 15.

39 Koehler, Zwingli und Luther II, 138.

II. The Sacrament Is The True Body Of Christ

Faced with the sentence "The Sacrament is the true body of Christ," one
may indeed ask what is meant by an intensification like the word
"true." If we speak of the body of Christ, we cannot reasonably be
speaking of any other body
than the one that was born of Mary, nailed
to the cross and arisen from the grave. This is "true," and it ought to
be impossible to mean anything else. But just as the word presence must
be defined as real presence, and just as in the
Nicene Creed, Christ
must be referred to as true God, so Christian experience with the work
of error makes it necessary to speak of Christ's "true" body. For
centuries speculative minds have found ways to empty words of their
meanings. From the very beginning the church was surrounded by a
heathen philosophy, Platonism, which divides existence into two levels:
the sphere of visible things and that of their real kernel, the idea, a
shadow world behind
things. (The Platonists themselves were of the
opinion that the physical world was a shadow world in relation to the
non-sensuous existence.) In the teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar
which is called Augustinian after the church
father, St. Augustine, it
is, following the thinking described above, a question of a presence of
the idea
of the body of Christ, which has an almost independent reality in
relation to the physical body of Christ in heaven. The medieval
church
sometimes used the concept substance in the same sense. Especially
within the school based on Thomas Aquinas, this concept was used to
designate the invisible something of things, a something which is the
essence but
which has no extension, is not visible and cannot be
weighed. The body of Christ which is present in the Sacrament of the
Altar becomes the substance of the body of Christ. The difficulty of
thought involved in the notion that the
whole body of Christ could be
contained in its entirety, not only in the little host, but also in a
most minute particle of it, is thus easily solved but at the price of
the physical concretion of the body of Christ. The substance is
declared to
be non-local; the same substance is in all of the air in
space just as it is in a little bit of air. In like fashion the illocal
and invisible substance of the body of Christ can, of course, be
contained anywhere. The doctrine of
transubstantiation, so-called--a
concept which in itself allows for the most divergent interpretations
and is by no means unambiguous--means for Thomas that the invisible
substance of the visible bread, lacking existence in space, is
replaced
by the equally invisible and illocal part of the body of Christ which
is called its substance. Since it is a question of spiritual realities
outside space, this change of substance does not in any way mean that
the body of Christ is
tied to any place. The remaining external
properties of the bread merely convey a relation to space which is not
precisely described: through the mediation of alien dimensions.40
If, then, those external properties of the bread should
cease to exist,
it would no longer be possible to speak of a presence of the substance
of the body of Christ. The latter would not cease to exist on the altar
or in any other place; it would never have been there through a genuine
existence of its own. It exists as a substance entirely exempted from
spatial conditions.

That this reasoning has disastrous consequences for the Real Presence
is evident from the following discussion in Thomas. It is important for
the modern reader to restrain his spontaneous judgment that the next
example used is based
on superstition. It is through the position
towards a certain occurrence within medieval popular devotion, with all
its deficiencies, that light will be thrown upon questions far more
serious than the one of the scripturalness of the
occurrence itself. It
is commonly said that the heart of medieval devotion is expressed in
the belief in the so-called Mass of St. Gregory, the miracle in which
Jesus became visible in the host. According to tradition, this occurred
once
when St. Gregory the Great celebrated mass. Similar occurrences
were mentioned as having happened in many quarters; sometimes the
suffering Man of Sorrows was seen, sometimes it was the newborn Babe.
Confronted with such
accounts, Thomas had to deny their possibility:
Jesus is not at all present in the Sacrament in such a way that He
could possibly be seen, even through a miracle. If the bread has ceased
to exist as the accounts propose to say, then the
body of Christ has
lost the one and only mediate tie-up with space. Furthermore,
substances are accessible only to the intellect. If the veil of the
species of the Sacrament falls, the concealed Savior, whom faith yearns
to behold, is not
unveiled. If the pious account is true, St. Thomas'
system falls instead, and this he must prevent. He looks for a way out
of his dilemma in various ways. In one case, he presumes that God has
effected a certain perception in the eyes
of those who saw the miracle,
i.e., an objective hallucination. Thomas' major thought must not, in
any case, be disturbed: that the substances as such are not visible or
accessible to any of the senses or to the imagination, but only to
the
intellect, the object of which is "that which is."41 For Thomas the reality of the Sacrament exists only in the ideal world of thought.

In this way the body of Christ has evaporated through philosophical

speculation, and the accounts of popular faith about the revelation of
the Man of Sorrows could not even hypothetically be true. The Sacrament
is no longer a veil
concealing the true body of Christ. It gives only
the shadow images of the wandering intellect, beyond all spheres of
reality. In correspondence about this, Hermann Sasse has penned the
following words: "Yes, Thomas Aquinas was a
Semi-Calvinist. He
anticipated the ideas of the Swiss reformers which in time totally
destroyed the Sacrament." Other quarters as well have come to this
insight in the debate now taking place, without voicing the complaint
expressed
by Hermann Sasse and without the important reservation that
Thomas' faith was better than his doctrine, and that he who wrote the
wonderful sacramental hymn, Pange lingua,
and the office of the Corpus Christi feast--a feast which
at that time
had not yet been united with the introduction of the extra-biblical
sacramental procession--reached higher with his heart and his devotion
than he did with his mind and with his pen.

The world of medieval theology was not exclusively under Thomas'

domination. At the side of his school of thought, Thomism or realism,
there was another school called nominalism or Ockhamism, the name of
which was derived
from its most outstanding representative, William of
Ockham. Its fate today is that it is described as the mother of
un-churchly theology and the grandmother of the Age of Enlightenment,
the French Revolution and unbelief. The
triumphal procession of the
Thomistic school within the later Roman Church has not only put the
heretic's hat on the factual views of its competitor. It has also
inspired all kinds of statements and slogans which do not, indeed,
correctly reproduce the viewpoint of nominalism. For example, it is
often said that nominalism denied that a natural knowledge of God (in
accordance with Romans 1:17) or objective knowledge at all was ever
possible. Such
statements are erroneous.42
Erroneous also are the cultural-historical considerations which regard
nominalism as the cancerous growth of European culture, the rescue of
which would be a return to a cultural synthesis of Thomistic
coinage,
which in fact never existed. These romantic considerations can be
sharpwitted in view of the symptoms of sickness in our modern-day
existence, but this does not vouch for insights into the history of
philosophy and culture.
The only thing, however, which has real
importance in our context, is the fact that nominalism rejects the
substance concept that Thomas embraces. The divorce has ceased between
the kernel of things in its incomprehensibility and
sublimity on the
one hand, and its factual concretion on the other. Even though
transubstantiation is accepted as an expression in obedience to the
church, the body of Christ is present as a genuine reality and with an
existence of its
own. The presence is indeed miraculous, so that by the
special intervention of God it cannot be beheld, and so that the
presence is the same in every particle of the host which can be broken,
without Christ's body being broken; but
nevertheless, that which
appeared when the Man of sorrows appeared is precisely the Lord and
gift of the host who has come to us. The fact that the species of the
bread has ceased to exist means only that the concealing veil has
fallen. Concerning this a modern Thomist theologian has written
critically, "As Ockham shows us, even learned theology has on this
point gone over the border into the sphere of popular devotion."43
Nominalism does, in fact, stand
up for the concrete, popular devotion,
for the non-speculative, non-philosophical, Biblical concretion in
matters concerning the body of Christ in the Sacrament. This should not
be construed to mean that nominalism was inclined to a
naive belief in
miracles and had a tendency to believe any and all accounts about
bleeding hosts and babes in swaddling clothes on Altars. In this
respect, representatives of this school were restrained and insisted on
the right to freely
investigate the instances. Nominalism retained the
right to ascertain that all such accounts were in fact pure
superstition. Nonetheless, it affirmed in principle the possibility of
such occurrences. The miracle that all of the resurrected
Christ is
given in the slightest particle of the host is not, in nominalism,
valued because of some idea that the body of Christ is deprived of its
physical concretion. Jesus can appear as true man in His Sacrament.

As far as the Lutheran teaching is concerned, it is important that

Luther confesses that he clearly takes his stand with the view of the
nominalistic school as to substances.44
This does not mean that Luther is the prisoner of a
philosophical
system. Like nominalism, he gave up on an insoluble problem. The
ancient shadow of reality beyond reality is gone. Thus Luther
identifies himself with the preaching which has hitherto occurred
saying that the natural
body of Christ in the Sacrament is as big,
wide, thick and long as it was when He was on the cross.45
"Thus they [the deniers of the Sacrament] say that it is unsuitable
that God should work so many miracles in the Sacrament which
He does
not do elsewhere. For the fact that we believe that the one body of
Christ is at one hundred thousand places [at one time], that so many
pieces of bread are broken, and that the large bones are hidden there,
that no one sees
them or recognizes them, all this they deem
unsuitable, are much surprised and do not understand that these are
thoughts without benefit. For if anyone wishes to measure in that way,
nothing in creation will remain."46
(Here follow
the parallels taken from the miracles of creation, such as
the miraculous fact of vision--typical for Luther. With a verve like
that of Chesterton, Luther shows how that which is natural is basically
absurd and incomprehensible.) These
words about the full presence of
the unlimited corporality of Christ in the consecrated host was just
too much for the Philippistic editors--pupils of Philip
Melanchthon--who edited the first edition of Luther's works.
Consequently, the
words were simply omitted.

The use of this editing principle made it imperative to remove quite a

number of passages in Luthers works. (The gnesio-Lutheran--genuine
Lutheran--edition of his works, which appeared immediately afterwards
as a countermove,
naturally put them back in again.) For Luther
contends consistently that Christ remains an external, bodily thing
after His resurrection.47
In a way that was and still is a stumbling block for spiritualists,
Luther determines that the
incarnate God remains man in all eternity
and that Christ's resurrection is not the act through which His
humanity is removed or diluted in any way. Luther sees a parallel
between the resurrected Christ's passing through the grave
stone and
His entering into the host. "When Christ's body passed through the
stone, His body remained as big and thick as it was before . . . . That
is just the way He is and Christ can be in the bread, too."48
With great sharpness,
Luther rejects here the medieval, natural
philosophical speculation which counted light as a basic element of
existence and thought that light, darkened in the present era and bound
to its effects, had by the resurrection of Christ been
restored to its
original power, which included the ability to penetrate bodies (subtilitas).
The superiority of the body of Christ in relation to material--in its
passing through the stone and its coming to the bread on the altar--was
thereby
established by means of diluting its corporality, making it
into something resembling fire. The stumbling block which the miracle
presents is thus removed: the resurrection and the Sacrament thus no
longer give the true body of
Christ, but rather a flame of fire
designated by that appellation. "But they will not get away from me by
their 'subtlety.' It is still the same body of Christ, and the door is
closed, too. And Christ did not slip in between the cracks and the
nail
holes. He had flesh and bones, as He Himself testifies in the last
chapter of St. Luke."49 Neither
at Easter nor in the Sacrament is Christ a spirit revelation or an
apparition of a spirit with a corporality like the protoplasma of the
Theosophists, an undefined fluid on the threshold between two
existences. "The body of Christ, be it as it may in spiritual or bodily
essence, visible or invisible, is real, natural flesh, which one can
grasp, feel, see and hear, born of a
woman, dead on the cross."50 Even if the resurrection made Christ exempt from, e.g., the need for food, he remains one who does not lack flesh and bones.51
Also when Christ is in the hearts of the believers, it is the man Jesus
that
takes His dwelling in man's temple with unlimited corporality.52
When the Apostle speaks of a spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15, this
should by no means be construed as meaning something opposed to flesh
and blood, but as
something in contrast to that animal life which is
subject to the law of corruption.53
And when Luther in extravagant words praises the body of Christ as a
spiritual flesh--we shall deal with this in detail in the last chapter
of this book-
-it is, of course, the bodily Christ that he is praising,
because God's body exercises a spiritual effect: "for it is a spiritual
flesh and it is not changed, but it changes and gives the Spirit to him
who eats."54 Here we stand
before Luther's
absolute awareness of the significance of sticking to
the letter of Scripture and to the ordinary meaning of the words. The
stumbling block of the Real Presence must never be removed by making
the body and blood of Christ
something other than the true body and
blood of Christ. Sabotage against the linguistic means of expression
cannot be used to save us from the hardness of biblical speech. Thus it
remains a fact that Jesus' glorification is not a
defrocking of His
human nature. This world is governed by a God with a human face: in the
center of existence there thrones a man with body and limbs like ours.
This God-Man effects the miracle that His body and blood are
contained
in the lowly species of the Sacrament.

40 Summa Theologica (ST) III, qu. 76, a. 5.

41 ST III, qu. 76, a. 7.

42 U. Helmer Junghans, "Ockham im Lichte der neueren Forschung," Arbeiten zur Geschichte und Theologie des Luthertums, Band XXI, Berlin u. Hamburg 1968.

43 Erwin Iserloh, Gnade und Eucharistie in der philosophischen Theologie des Wilhelm von Ockham. Wiesbaden 1956, 257 note 243.

44 WA 6:510.13ff. (LW 36:31ff.).

45 WA 18:142.35ff. (LW 40:153).

46 WA 19:486.22ff. (LW 36:338).

47 WA 23:261.26. (LW 37:136).

48 WA 26:346.36ff. (LW 37:216).

49 WA 26:419.25ff. (LW 37:279).

50 WA 23:185.1ff. (LW 37:89).

51 WA 20:759.11f. (LW 30:302).

52 WA 20:759.6ff. (LW 30:302).

53 WA 20:759.10ff. (LW 30:302).

54 WA 23:205.10f. (LW 37:100).

III. The Sacrament Does Not Coincide With The Omnipresence Of The Body Of Christ

More than any other controversies, the Christological controversies

concerning the one person and two natures of Christ have, for the
modern observer, the stamp of dried flowers in a botanist's collection.
Even when it is supposed
that they may have had significance for people
of a past age whose thinking had the prerequisites for them, they are
explicitly said to lack relevance for people in our day. Even a
conservative sermon which intends to have redemption
as its focal point
avoids everything smacking of dogmatic Christology. The result of this
is, however, mortally detrimental to faith in all its functions. If
redemption does not describe how One of the Holy and Immortal Trinity
suffers
on the cross in the human nature He assumed, the meditation on
the person of Christ will inevitably become a nauseating hero worship.
The entire direction of Christian worship to the central person in the
New Testament will then
assume traits of an unhealthy intimacy. The
feeling of anxiety, which seizes both believers and unbelievers faced
with a Savior, however forgiving, who is portrayed outside the orthodox
rules of Christology, can be said to be a
righteous protest against
heathenism in the sanctuary, launched by both innate and Biblical
monotheism. This holds true especially in regard to the body and blood
of Christ which rest upon the altar in the midst of the congregation.
If
it is not a question of God's body and blood--belonging to Him not
as clothes but as parts of His eternal person--both Holy Communion and
a book like this one, which is devoted to the fact of the Real
Presence, become
incomprehensible and obnoxious. The rejoicing kindled
before the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament is possible only
if the persons who adore know that they are standing in front of the
Power that created them, whom they
cannot refuse to worship without
denying the sense of all human existence.

It is often presumed that the great denominations have a common

Christology. The disputes once waged and connected with the battle
names from the coast of Asia Minor--Nicea, Ephesus, Chalcedon--are
presumed to have had
lasting, unambiguous results, preserved in
unanimity by the denominations of today in their confessions of faith.
This uniform picture does not correspond to actual facts. The Lutheran
Church represents a Christology which is
essentially different from
that of both Roman and Reformed theology. This means, consequently,
that the churches have different interpretations of the decisions of
the council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451. The decrees of that synod
involved, among other things, the relation between the divine and human
natures of Christ with the formula unconfusedly and indivisibly.
This formula is often heard in our day, but it is rarely perceived that
there might be difficulties
in interpreting these words. However, even
the presentation given in the conventional works on the history of
dogma ought to arouse the observant reader's suspicion. These tell us
that Patriarch Nestorius was wrongly condemned by
the Chalcedon synod:
his teaching on the two natures is said to be actually in agreement
with the decisions which pronounced the New Testament condemnation over
him. On the other hand, we are told that Patriarch Cyril of
Alexandria,
to whom the council paid its homage, was in fact a heretic from the
viewpoint of the council's own teaching. The latter is supposed to have
been guilty of monophysitism, i.e., the peculiarity of the human nature
would
have been swallowed up by Jesus divine nature so that in fact
only one nature was to be found in the God-man. Behind this accusation
lies the following thought: Cyril of Alexandria indubitably taught a
real communication of the
divine attributes to the human nature of
Jesus. For this reason, it is thought the two natures cannot have
existed unconfusedly. However, this axiom is not an axiom. As we shall
find, Lutheran Christology, which considers itself the
heir of Cyril of
Alexandria and John of Damascus (highly revered also in the Eastern
Church), retains the integrity of the natures and nevertheless admits
the communication of the divine attributes to the created human nature
of Jesus.
Once one is able to think this thought, the controversies
leading to Chalcedon appear in more comprehensible patterns.

The settlement which the Lutheran reformation worked out here and which
sets a boundary against both Roman Catholic and Reformed Christology
means that the banner of Cyrillian Christology is once again raised in
the West. A
false, un-Biblical, Nestorian, schematic Christology is
replaced by the faith in the One Lord. The Christology which had become
the leading tradition in Latin Christendom had come to regard Christ's
humanity as having the same
relation to His divinity as Christ's
clothing had to the human nature. Only a form of ownership, called in
this case person,
ties together, from the beginning, the Son of the Virgin in the crib
and the eternal Word. This leads to the notion
that, e.g., the miracles
wrought by the man Jesus in principle were worked in the same way as
the miracles wrought by apostles and prophets: the power comes from a
divine assistance rendered from the outside. The man Jesus cannot
be
worshipped either. The person of the God-Man has been deeply split.
Nestorius, the one officially condemned, had once again seized power.

From 1519 on, Luther proclaims an interpretation of Phil. 2:6ff. which

results in a decisive change. Now the old decision of the Synod of
Ephesus was again to resound splendidly: "If any one does not confess
that the flesh of the
Lord is quickening, because it was made the
Word's own, who quickens all things, let him be anathema."55
Once again, what Ambrose of Milan speaks of was to become a living
reality: "the flesh of Christ, which we today also adore
in the
mysteries [the Sacrament], and which the apostles adored in the Lord
Jesus, as we have said above."56
This big change was not caused by general speculation about the divine
and the human and their relationship to each other,
nor by a religious
need, but (like the change in the question of justification) by a
careful, exegetical study of a Bible verse. We find here an interesting
parallel to the Reformation discovery of justification as far as the
techniques of
exegesis are concerned. In both cases, Luther succeeds in
freeing himself from the traditional, philosophical interpretation of
single words; righteousness in the one case, form in the
other. Around the latter word the revived Cyrillian
Christology is
developed. Luther realizes that form of God in Phil. 2 ("being in the
form of God") does not refer to the divine nature as such, but to the
divine attributes in which Jesus' human nature rested, but which He did
not fully
employ during His state of humiliation in order to make the
work of redemption possible.57
This means also that the humanity of Christ is the iron which can be
made to glow in the fire of the Godhead unto freedom from suffering
and
death, the iron which lets divine power be exercised by the human
nature in miracles also during the time of humiliation. This is the
one, inseparable "I" speaking and acting in the New Testament.

In 1526 Luther consciously and expressly draws the conclusion that the
human nature of Christ is like His divine nature, omnipresent.58
At this point we should mention that the usual term for this, ubiquity,
does not occur in Luther's
writings. It is an invective used by later
opponents of Luther's teaching. It was normally rejected by Luther's
followers as an offensive word. For a variety of reasons, it seems
reasonable not to use it here. No matter what may be said
about the
terminology, what is important is to determine what Luther means when
he speaks of the omnipresence of the body of Christ. This does not mean
the last stage in a change in Christ's humanity conditioned by the
history of
salvation so that His humanity, after the materiality of
earthly life, is replaced by the resurrection body of the forty days,
which in turn is surpassed by the deification of the ascension,
whereafter perhaps the day of judgment may
reawaken the concrete
conditions of earthly life when He comes again visibly in the skies.
For Luther the omnipresence of the body of Christ means instead that
the body of Christ took God's superworldly relation to every point of
creation already in the womb of Mary. Now Christ's human nature is,
from the womb on, higher and deeper in God and before God than any
angel.59 Yea, he says, Christ was in heaven when He was still walking on earth.60
Luther
explicitly rejects the idea that the ascension meant that
omnipresence ought to be ascribed to Christ because of that event: "For
by His glorification He did not become another person, but He is
present everywhere as He was before
and always has been since."61
Behind the notion of two alternating forms of existence of the body of
Christ probably lies the idea that the omnipresence would imply a
physical change of the body of Christ, a peculiar diffusion of
matter
into an infinity, conceived physically:

Here you will say: would Christ's humanity be

extended and roll out like a hide? . . . I answer: in accordance with
your darkened mind which comprehends the . . . bodily, comprehensible
way, you will not understand this;
neither do the enthusiasts, who have
no other thought than that the Godhead is omnipresent in a bodily,
comprehensible fashion as if God were a big, extended thing extending
all through creation.62

It is consequently the concrete, physical body of Christ, the same body

as before and after the ascension, that takes God's immediate relation
to His creation. Only a confused, unclear thinking operating with naive
physical categories
has difficulties as concern the relation between
Creator and the created. In order to explain what is at issue, Luther
adopts a quotation from Augustine: "All things are in Him rather than
that He is anywhere in them,"63
and writes:
"They [the things] do not measure or encompass Him, but it
is rather that He has them present before Himself, measures them and
encompasses them."64 In the
child Jesus sleeping in Mary's lap rests all creation, and the galaxies
meet in a human being: "Him whom the world cannot comprehend, Mary
found upon her lap."65

This proves drastically the untenability of the axiom which lies behind
the modern interpretation of the Chalcedon creed. The deification of
Jesus' body is consistent with Jesus' full humanity. Cyrillian
Christology does not indeed
burn up Jesus' human nature, at the latest,
with His ascension into the fire of the Godhead, diluting it into
hovering smoke. Cyrillian, Lutheran Christology counts on a normal
humanity, which, while retaining its given created
concretion, assumes
the role as the center of everything and the ruler of all, the object
of all adoration. All of creation flows into a genuine human being who
really suffers and dies on the cross, but what He dies is God's
immortal
death. Of this Jesus Luther says: "For since Jesus is one with
God, you must put this His essence far, far outside of creation, as far
outside as God is outside, but on the other hand, so deeply within
creation and as close to it as God is
in His creation."66

Thereby we have reached the stage in our presentation at which we must

explain in what way the insight described here constitutes a part of
the Lutheran teaching on the Sacrament of the Altar, and in what way it
is not a part thereof.
First and foremost it must be stated that
Lutheran Christology lays claim to being Biblical dogma in the pregnant
sense of the word. We are not dealing with an extra-biblical
speculation but with a central proposition of Holy
Scripture. At the
same time it must be stated just as clearly that this dogma has the
character of a merely auxiliary construction as far as the exposition
of the doctrine of the Lords Supper is concerned. Its role in the
presentation of the
meaning of the Sacrament of the Altar is entirely
due to historical factors. Here we must consider Luther's polemical
situation. Zwingli, his chief opponent, denied the very possibility
that a body could exist at once in many places.
This denial was
directed against the possibility of the sacramental presence of the
body and blood of Christ, since such presence necessarily presupposes
that the presence is equipped in such a miraculous way. According to
the
doctrine of the Real Presence, the body of Christ is at one and the
same time present in its entirely in every single host on the altar as
well as in every part of each host. And masses are celebrated at the
same time in many different
places. When Zwingli declares that this is
impossible and that it is incompatible with the natural existence of
the body of Christ, Luther takes it upon himself to prove that
something similar does exist in another case. If he succeeds
with that
proof, Zwingli's objection must fall to the ground. (For Luther it is
indeed true that the divine omnipotence cannot be limited, even if
there is no parallel. If he could not find a parallel, this would not
be any proof against the
Real Presence and Zwingli would not win
anyway.) Luther now points to the omnipresence of the body of Christ;
hence at one and the same time Christ's body is present in different
places. This condition contains the possibility of
sacramental presence
at masses celebrated simultaneously: if the one way is possible, so is
the other.

This has led some people to draw a conclusion (entirely foreign to

Luther) that the sacramental presence coincides with the omnipresence.
The delight with which this identification has sometimes been accepted
and taught,
indubitably conceals the desire to flee from the reality of
the sacramental presence. All of a sudden a way out seems to have been
found, so that the denier of the Sacrament can proclaim--apparently on
entirely legitimate grounds and
within a convincing frame of
orthodoxy--that the host on the altar is as much Christs body as the
egg on his breakfast table at home. Theologians devoted to the Real
Presence have in like manner felt compelled to express regret about
the
fact that Luther stressed the omnipresence so much and that this
threatened to empty the Real Presence of its reality. In actual fact
Luther renders exact accounts, differentiating between different types
of presence that ought not be
confused. The Latin terms and concepts
which Luther borrows from medieval scholasticism should not lead anyone
to believe that Luther is operating here with artificial, un-biblical
ideas. The auxiliary service of the various terms
employed is not
unlike the service rendered by words like "nature" and "person" within
Christology. These explanations by Luther were quite naturally taken
over by the Lutheran Confessions, where anyone can easily study them.67
Luther reckons with at least three types of presence of the one,
unchanged, physical natural body of Christ. The first type of presence
is the way in which bodies ordinarily exist and it is called circumscriptive. The second is termed
diffinitive,
and it covers, e.g., the presence of the body of Christ in the bread of
the Sacrament of the Altar. We have already touched upon its
peculiarity: it is a question of a real presence in the consecrated,
visible elements, but in
such a way that the whole is in every part (totum in parte)
at the same time. These precise concepts are not taken up at random.
They take their point of departure from the fact that Christ made the
words "This is my body" valid for
every single recipient of the
Sacrament: for everyone individually, undivided.68 If the circumscriptive
manner of presence were to be applied to the Sacrament, Christ would be
divided up, crushed in pieces and devoured like other
food--this is
exactly that of which the deniers of the Sacrament accuse the adherents
of the Real Presence. That is the reason why Luther spontaneously goes
back to the medieval teaching concerning the diffinitive form
of presence,
and in doing so he speaks of the holy Church under the
Papacy, which sang the proud, splendid words penned by Thomas Aquinas
in the mass of the Feast of Corpus Christi: Sumit unus, sumunt millo, quantum iste, tantum ille nec
sumtus absumitur, ("whether one or thousands eat, All receive the selfsame meat, Nor the less for others leave").69
In this form of the presence, a false, useless speculation does not
speak, but faith, receiving the miracle. The third
form of presence is
the omnipresence of the body of Christ, called repletive, the celestial, unsearchable presence. It cannot at all be comprehended or understood even by the angels,70 and can most certainly not be tasted by mouth and
tongue in earthly matter. This presence is infinitely more wonderful71.
Here it is not a question of Christ's presence in the things, but their
presence in Him. Luther determines that there is a unprecedented
difference between the
diffinitive and the repletive
modes of presence: "that the body of Christ has a much higher and more
supernatural essence when it is one person with God than it had when it
was in the sealed stone and the door...for the other way in
which the
body of Christ was in the stone, all saints will also possess in
heaven."72 (The other way at the
Easter miracle--His going through the closed stone and the closed
door--is, as Luther always points out, the same as in the
Sacrament of
the Altar.) Touching Christ's body with one's hands and mouth in His
relation to creation is as impossible as grasping the Godhead itself.
Thus when Luther says, "There is a difference between His
[omni-]presence and
your grasping [Him in the Sacrament],"73
he is not, indeed, operating with modern existentialistic
interpretations, in which the subjective experience for me merely gives
an immediate importance to something generally given. Luther
stood here
on the foundation of the Biblical teaching concerning the Creator's
exaltedness and incomprehensibility, and at the same time on the
foundation of the Biblical teaching on how we in the Sacrament truly
eat and drink the
body and blood of the Son of Man.

Consideration must be given to the fact that the definitions circumscriptive, diffinitive, and repletive reckon with genuine, constitutive differences. The omnipresence must absolutely not be understood as the spread out hide, as
circumscriptive infinity, thought physically. It is equally impermissible to interpret the sacramental presence as circumscriptive presence, since communion would then break the body of Christ in pieces. These two essential
differences between repletive-circumscriptive and diffinitive-circumscriptive correspond to the difference between repletive and diffinitive.
Contending that the presence is actually always the same, and thus
putting together what
revelation has put asunder, is a false schematism
that wants to explain the incomprehensible using a single formula, and
that is unwilling to let the ways of God be manifold.

55 Concordia Triglotta, 1129 (Catalog of Testimonies).

56 Concordia Triglotta, 1127.

57 WA 2:147.38ff.(LW 31:301).

58 WA 19:491.17ff. (LW 36:342).

59 WA 26:344.28ff. (LW 37:232).

60 WA 26:343.36f. (LW 37:232).

61 WA 23:147.31ff. (LW 37:66).

62 WA 26:333.26ff. (LW 37:219f.).

63 Patrologia latina 40:15.

64 WA 26:336.13f. (LW 37:223).

65 WA 35:434.12f. (LW 53:241), Swedish Hymnal 62, v. 3.

66 WA 26:336.15f.( LW 37:223); Tappert, 587 (SD VII.101).

67 Tappert, 586 (SD VII.98-103).

68 WA 54:145.30 (LW 38:293).

69 WA 54:145.31f., 146.3f.; Eng. trans. in St Andrew Bible Missal, 654 (LW 38:293).

70 WA 26:336.22 (LW 37:223).

71 WA 26:336.13 (LW 37:223).

72 WA 26:335.9ff. (LW 37:222).

73 WA 23:151.3f. (LW 37:68).

IV. The Sacrament Means That Real Bread Is The Body Of Christ

The current discussion about the content of the Lord's Supper has usually centered on the word "is" in "This is my body." The Lutheran "is"--in Latin est--has
thus become an established concept. Nowadays we hardly even encounter
any debate concerning the "This", despite the fact that at this very
point we find one of Luther's most important contributions to the right
understanding of the Sacrament. In fact, it would be entirely
appropriate to speak of the
Lutheran "this." Medieval scholasticism
also posed the question as to what "This" in Jesus' words, "This is my
body", referred to. The answer given was that "this" referred to
Christ's body. Behind this answer lies the requirement of
school
philosophy in those days that "is" must really mean "is" and that
subject and predicate must really be identical. Jesus' words at the
first celebration must thus mean: My body is my body. Luther goes
against all exegesis of this
philosophical type. Luther lets the text
speak, and according to the text Jesus took visible bread in His hands
and let the word "This" refer to that very bread: "[I] stick simply to
His words and firmly believe that Christ's body is not
only in the
bread, but that the bread is the body of Christ."74
In a decisive point, this surpasses scholastic theology. It is no
longer a matter of tying a presence of Christ to the host in one way or
another, or of expressing a presence of
one thing in another. Instead,
Luther says that the earthly bread in the hands of Jesus and in the
hands of the celebrant is the body of Christ; and he cites a
parallel that was shocking in his day: This man is God. Just as the man
Jesus is
God, the bread is the body of Christ. This seems to be close
to a deification of the bread. On top of this, Luther employs the
illustration of glowing iron, the old illustration which was used to
express how Jesus' humanity participates
in the power of the Godhead.

The scandal this gave rise to was great. The adherents of the doctrine
of transubstantiation had let the bread be destroyed in obedience to
scholastic logic in order that Jesus' words, "My body is my body",
might be true. In doing so,
one had avoided putting the created bread
into any kind of relation to Christ's holy body. The opposition which
the Roman theologians directed against Luther is thus not by any means
the kind of opposition the modern Christian,
inspired by
Protestant-Reformed thinking, would like to imagine. No one accuses
Luther of wanting to make the Sacrament vanish in a spiritual direction
when he denied transubstantiation and said that bread remained. On the
contrary, Luther is accused of an inadmissible materialization of the
divine: he mixed earthly and divine with each other.75 His Reformed adversaries chime in and, from their point of view, find that Rome's teaching is more tolerable
than Luther's.76
Yea, if the Swiss reformers are to be called Sacrament enthusiasts
because they do not confess that the bread is the body of Christ, all
of the Papists must be called Sacrament enthusiasts too.77

It cannot be said, however, that the Lutheran doctrine of the Sacrament

of the Altar elevates the created bread to the throne of the Holy
Trinity and gives the piece of bread baked by human hands the position
given to the fruit of the
womb of Mary at the incarnation. The
accusations against Luther from the left and from the right are thus
far unfair. What he wants to say is rather that Christology inter alia
offers such a union between two things that one is spoken
of by the
other. "This man has created the stars," can be said of Jesus, although
His human nature was not created at the time. The personal union
between godhead and human nature nevertheless makes this statement
possible. This
unity of person has, of course, not arisen between
Jesus' humanity and the host, but we nevertheless have the same kind of
statement: "This baked bread is the saving body of Christ." This type
of statement is to be found elsewhere as
well. The Holy Ghost became
visible at the Baptism in the Jordan according to the testimony of
Scripture: Upon whom thou shalt see the Spirit descending and remaining
on him, the same is he which baptizeth with the Holy Ghost
(John 1:33).
Now it is true that the Third Person of the Holy Trinity is not visible
and is not a bird; nevertheless it is true that such a unity did arise
that the dove is rightly referred to as the Holy Ghost: "Therefore, it
is under all
circumstances rightly spoken, when one points to the bread
and says: 'This is the body of Christ, and he who sees the bread sees
the body of Christ,' just as John says that he saw the Holy Ghost when
he saw the dove."78 The same
relation exists, e.g., in the biblical apparitions of angels. The
angels are invisible, incorporeal beings, but they appear to us in the
form of young men, and this form of apparition is without further ado
called angels.79 In everyday
life
the same mode of expression is used when we say of glowing iron
that it is burning fire or of a purse, This is a hundred guilders.80 All of these parallels mean that although two intact materials are at hand, they have nevertheless de
facto
been melted into a unity, so that the one is spoken of as the other.
The purse is no longer ordinary leather, it is gold-leather: "the glow
of the gold, which cannot be seen, has been transmitted to the visible
container, which in the
eyes of the person regarding it has become the
concretion of the desirable gold. Thus it holds true of the Sacrament
that the host is no longer ordinary bread like bread in the oven, but
flesh-bread or body-bread; it is a bread which has
become one
sacramental being or thing with the body of Christ."81
It is indeed true that the bread is something baked, round and thin;
that the body of Christ is a human body, born of the Virgin, formed
humanly in every respect, is
also true. In the Sacrament, however, both
become one single thing. The round, white host is the object of
everyone's looking and attention, when Jesus proclaims it His holy
body. This body is revealed not only in the bread, but also
by the
bread: he who sees the bread sees the body of Christ.82
No matter how true the physical observation of the unchanged element
may be, a condition of unification has occurred and this causes the
congregation to see in the
chalice no longer ordinary wine like that in
the cellar, but blood-wine.83

To this a comment must be added concerning the expression in, with and
under,often used as a typical expression for the Lutheran concept of
the Real Presence: The body of Christ is present in, with and under the
bread. We find this
expression only one single time in Luther's
writings, and there it is used to show that this wording could in a
pinch be cited as a way of denying the Real Presence.84
Compared with "This is" or "The bread is", this wording lacks
precision. When the Lutheran Confessions use the wording in an
affirmative sense, this is nevertheless not a falling away from
Luther's doctrine on the Sacrament. It is stated clearly that this
wording is secondary and dependent upon
certain conditions:

In addition to the words of Christ and of St. Paul

(the bread in the Lord's Supper 'is the body of Christ' or 'the
communion of the blood of Christ') we at times also use the formulas 'under the bread, with the bread, in
the
bread. We do this to reject the papistic transubstantiation and to
indicate the sacramental union between the untransformed substance of
the bread and the body of Christ.

Thereby they wished to

indicate that, even though they also use these different formulas, "in
the bread, under the bread, with the bread", they still accept the
words of Christ in their strict sense and as they read . . . . In both
his Great
Confession and especially his Last Confession Concerning the Communion, Dr. Luther defended with great zeal and earnestness the formula which Christ employed in the Last Supper."85
Thus, for the Confessions, "in, with and
under" is only auxiliary to
the proposition that the unchanged bread is the body of Christ, and
that the sacramental union thus has taken place so that two unchanged
elements have become one. The Confessions cannot thus be said to
be
guilty of a flight from the hardness of Christ's words. Soon enough,
however, even within the Lutheran camp, "the bread is the body of
Christ" was felt to be too obtrusive. Melanchthon could stand it only
of sheer necessity. Here,
as in many other points, his views soon
became predominant, and the late Orthodox Lutheran theologian David
Hollazius, at the end of the seventeenth century, could without
hesitation write that this paradox of Luther's was not
Biblical.86
The popularity enjoyed today by the expression "in, with and under"
must to a considerable degree be considered part of the
spiritualization to which the Real Presence has been subjected. Behind
this often shimmers also
the inability to defend the doctrine of the
Real Presence on biblical grounds: one embraces it because the church
has always taught the Real Presence, because it is Lutheran or for
similar reasons. This is the reason why one likes to
stick to wordings
that have catechetical value ("the presence of Jesus," "the Real
Presence," etc.), but do not in any way enter upon the exegetical
foundations of the Sacrament.

The background furnished here is a necessary prerequisite for

discussion of Luther's attitude towards transubstantiation. As shown
above, Luther had to reject transubstantiation because of the
unambiguous report of the Bible that
Jesus, according to the
evangelists and St. Paul, took bread in His hands and called that very
bread His body. Nevertheless, Luther's judgment on transubstantiation
is very mild: "However, the error [i.e. transubstantiation] is very
unimportant as long as the body and blood of Christ and the Word are
left intact."87
"It does not mean much to me, for as I have often declared openly, I do
not wish to fight about it; if the wine remains or not, for me it is
enough that
the blood of Christ is present; may whatever God wills
happen to the wine. And rather than to have mere wine with the
enthusiasts I would stick to mere blood with the Papists."88 Also late in his lifetime, Luther makes use of
generous statements like these,89
and what they mean is that transubstantiation is, in his eyes, a pretty
indifferent matter, and it may be embraced by anyone who wishes to do
so. Even if it is true that this cannot be the final thing that
can be
said of Luther's attitude towards transubstantiation, what can be said
with certainty is that the energetic hatred against the doctrine of
transubstantiation which is flourishing wildly within the churches that
have descended from
the Lutheran reformation is the testimony of a kind
of belief in the Sacrament which is basically different from that of
Luther. The cheap fear of transubstantiation fears too much an excess
of presence, an excess of powerful words of
consecration, an excess of
genuflections and worship of a heaven which has come to earth. To such
fearful guardians of a spiritual Sacrament Luther would have called out
mockingly that he believed something worse than
transubstantiation,
indeed that what he believed in was sevenfold transubstantiation.

At the same time, Luther's writings do contain sharp words against

transubstantiation. These words are, however, not an expression of the
mature Luther's better insight in comparison to the uncertainty of
Luther as a young man.
Neither are they occasional results of fits of
temper in comparison with calmer evaluations. What is at issue is
instead those cases when the change of substance is defended with
dangerous arguments, such as when King Henry VIII
proclaims the theory
that Scripture can be ambiguous so that bread need not be taken
literally and that God could not be united with His unworthy creation.
Against such things Luther does not spare words; the doctrine of
transubstantiation defended in that way is impious and blasphemous.90
That is the way he puts it in writings of an early date. Shortly before
his death, Luther again brings a similarly harsh judgment. It occurs in
a passage in which he
at the same time with great earnestness insists
on the adoration of the Sacrament, and this proves that the Luther
confronting us is not a Luther who had abandoned his concrete faith in
the Sacrament. Luther says here that everything
that is taught without
the Word is an un-Christian lie. Without the Word there is no faith,
and without faith, everything is sin. For this reason
transubstantiation, even in the form of a pious sentence in the mouth
of learned theologians,
is lying and impiousness.91
Thus these words strike conscious speculation, both the canonized error
and the private opinion nourished by the individual theologian. But
they do not strike the simple lay faith in transubstantiation; this
sort of faith is the one which enjoys Luther's tolerance as described
above. Luther appeals to the simple faith of the medieval parishioners
in the miracle of the mass, and he rejoices without restraint over the
simplicity of this faith,
which could not understand more of the
learned distinctions than what is seen is bread and what is not seen is
the adorable Christ reposing under the species of bread.92
Unconcerned about useless subtleties, the medieval
congregation
assembled at church believed in transubstantiation, worshipped Jesus in
the host and thus embraced the same faith in the Real Presence as
Luther possessed. That which conveyed to the simple people the real
content of
Christ's words is not subjected to the criticism which
Luther voices on a higher level in accordance with what dogmatic
assertion demands. This observation is corroborated by the overlooked
fact that Luther never attacks
transubstantiation in his sermons, which
are otherwise so rich in dogmatic assertions.

The problem treated here, Luther's relation to the doctrine of

transubstantiation, should not be confused with another problem which
concerns pure terminology, namely the use of the word "change." Luther
himself used this
expression and other similar wordings as a technical
term for the fact that in the mass bread and wine become the body and
blood of Christ.93 This does not involve a belief in any change of substance. A similar choice of words
occurs in the Lutheran Confessions94
and the Lutheran theologians of the generation following Luther did not
feel compelled not to speak of a change, particularly in view of the
fact that the concept was at home in Christian theology
long before
anyone conceived of transubstantiation. Just as a blue thing can be
changed into a red thing, while the thing remains, bread can be said to
be changed into the body of Christ without the bread ceasing to exist.
Above all,
the old theologians have no feeling of fear that they might
be saying something too great. Only the greatest words suit God. For
this reason, Martin Chemnitz, the leading man in the completion of the
Lutheran Confessions (often
called the second Martin because of his
role as the spiritual heir of the Reformer) says of the miracle of the
mass that it is "a great, miraculous and veritably divine change" (Haec certe magna, miraculosa, et vere divina est
mutatio).95

74 WA 6,:511.19ff. (LW 36:34).

75 WA 10ii:207.36ff. The accusation is raised by, e.g., Henry VIII of England, Cochlaeus, Eck and the faculty of the Sorbonne.

76 Oekolampadius in Acta Scripta publica wirtenbergicae, Tubingen 1720, 66.

77 Oekolampadius, Antwort auf Mart Luthers Bekenntnis vom Abendmahl Christi, printed in Martin Luthers Sammtliche Schriften, St. Louis, MO 1880-1920, XX:1375ff.

78 WA 26:442.29ff. (LW 37:300).

79 WA 26:441.23ff. (LW 37:298).

80 WA 26:444.4ff. (LW 37:301f.).

81 WA 26:445.10ff. (LW 37:303).

82 WA 26:442.30 (LW 37:300).

83 WA 26:445.10ff. (LW 37:303).

84 WA 26:447.24 (LW 37:306).

85 Tappert, 575 (SD VII, 35-40).

Tappert's editon has been changed here to conform to the original and
to the sense of the text. Tappert gives as the words of Christ "true
body of Christ" and as the words of St. Paul "a participation in
the
body of Christ." Luther and the Confessions did not put "true" into the
mouth of Christ, nor did they interpret St. Paul's words as "a
participation in" but "communion of." Cf. WA 26:490 (LW 37:353, 356), where Luther says that
the word "communion is the common good which many share."

86 David Hallazius, Examen Theologicum Acroamaticum, Leipzig & Stockholm 1725, 608.

87 WA 11:441.19f. (LW 36:287).

88 WA 26:462.1ff. (LW 37:317).

89 WA Br 8:3263,38ff., 10:3885.84ff.

90 WA 10ii:208.31.

91 WA 54:425.1 ff. (LW 34:355).

92 WA 6:510.20ff., 509.35ff. (LW 36:32-35).

93 Luther's terminology is described in V. Vajta, Die Theologie des Gottesdienstes bei Luther, Goettingen 1954, II:185, note 93.

94 Tappert, 179 (Ap X, 2).

95 Martin Chemnitz, Examen Concilii Tridentini, Berlin 1861, ed. Preuss, 313 (English, Examination, tr F. Kramer, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis, MO, 258).

V. The Sacrament Is Achieved By The Reading Of The Words Of Institution

To the modern Protestant, a special characteristic of the Roman

priesthood and of the Roman mass is the power-laden act consisting of
the reading of the words of institution, called the consecration. That
which happens in the
flickering light of candles and at the sound of a
ringing bell is the sum of what constitutes the attractive and
repulsive traits of Catholicism: the claim of divine power, extended
also to material things and put into the hands of a
consecrated
priesthood. Already at the discussions at Marburg Castle, Zwingli, the
self-elected representative of spiritual religion, threw in Luther's
face the accusation that the doctrine of Lutheranism was a
re-introduction of the
papacy in this particular point, meaning that
the whispering of the priest conjured God. This accusation has never
been silenced, and much of the perturbation that has been awakened
around the high church movement that has come
about in various
Protestant quarters, is an echo of Zwingli's protest.

Here, just as with regard to transubstantiation, it must, however, be

said that Luther and his Lutheran followers go much further than the
modern Protestant fears and suspects. Here as well as in other points,
medieval theology was
under pressure not to let the finite contain the
infinite, and it was compelled to operate with limitations which made
the reading of the words of institution much less powerful than is
usually presumed to have been the case. The
nominalistic school
reckoned here, as well as elsewhere, with mere parallel events: God
works from heaven in accordance with an established covenant, when the
priest executes the sacramental blessing through the words of
institution, which in themselves are empty and without power. The
Thomistic school thought differently and wanted to acknowledge a power
in the words of institution, but this power is not the divine,
uncreated power which effects
the Real Presence itself; it is merely a
created power which functions as a subordinate tool for the process
that leads to the Presence of the Sacrament. This thought goes back to
the notion that Christ as a human being did not possess
the power to
consecrate the Sacrament with His human words; His words, too, were of
necessity without divine power. Hence the ordinary priest cannot, of
course, effect more than the great High Priest in His human nature,
which
never exercises genuine divine power.96

The same concept occurs in the Thomistic doctrine of Baptism which, it

is supposed, is effected instrumentally by such a subordinate, created
power. In his disputes concerning the medieval concept of sacraments,
Luther bitingly
terms this power krefftlina, little power.97
Luther replaces it with the power beyond all powers: God the Holy Ghost
Himself. God is in the Word and He Himself works the miracle of new
creation. This holds equally true of the
Sacrament of the Altar. The
word spoken over the created element conveys directly the uncreated,
eternal power of God. A modern German scholar has rightly said about
this that, with regard to the relation between the Holy Ghost
and the
element, Luther does not say less than, but rather outdoes medieval
theology.98 When Luther reckons
with a genuine, divine power in the words of institution for the
Sacrament of the Altar, he does not without further
reflection adopt
the patterns of the Middle Ages, whose theology thus, to some extent,
had a construction different from Luther's.

For other reasons, too, it is not possible to presume--as is often

done--that Luther, in a routine fashion, simply took over his teaching
on the effect of the words of institution as a legacy from a dark,
papistic past. When attacked by
Zwingli, Luther consciously and very
emphatically defended the biblical teaching on consecration. It can
also be said that in our day the real controversy concerning the Real
Presence stands precisely at this point. It is only the
consecration
that ties the body and blood of Christ to bread and wine; it is the
consecration that makes the bread and wine the body and blood of
Christ. Without a clear teaching on the consecration it is, indeed,
still possible to say that
the communicants receive the body and blood
of Christ and that the heavenly gift is present. But the essential
thing will be missing: the fact that Christ has made bread and wine His
holy body and His holy blood and commanded us
to eat it. A presence
alongside bread and wine need not differ from the general presence of
Christ in His two natures (which includes his body and blood); this
general presence is promised for every service and is constantly being
received by faith. Only the consecration ties the presence to the
elements and creates the Real Presence in its specific sense. Only the
conscious by-passing of the stumbling-block of the consecration has
made it possible to create the
modern union documents which wish to
reconcile the Presence and the absence of the body of Christ and which
pretend to represent a higher unity between Lutheranism and the denial
of the Sacrament.99

For Luther, Christ Himself entrusted the consecration to the Church in Holy Scripture.

If anyone were to say that Christ did not command us to

pronounce these words "This is my body" in the Lord's Supper, Answer:
It is true that it does not say in the text "You shall pronounce 'This
is my body'," neither is
there any hand painted pointing to it [=no NB
is printed in the margin]. . . neither does it say in the text you
shall pronounce "take and eat." Neither does it say "You shall take
bread and bless it, etc." Let us see who would
be so bold as to say
that one should not take bread nor bless it nor pronounce "Take and
eat." Is it not enough that He says at the end "This do in remembrance
of me"? If we are to do what He did, then we must verily take
bread,
bless it, break it and give it and say "This is my body." For it is all
included in the word of command "Do this . . ." He said that we are to
pronounce the words "This is my body" in His person and name, at His
command and bidding.100

Thus, when the holy words are pronounced in the person of Christ, they
are not an empty phrase. In order to emphasize the wonderful power of
the words, Luther employs two concepts which he originally derived from
Zwingli's
angry attacks on the consecration. Luther speaks of deed
words and command words (Thettel-wort and heissel-wort).
A deed-word is a word that describes a deed of God and does not call
for action or repetition on our part, as if I
were to say from Gen. 1:
"Let there be sun and moon," nothing would happen.101
Command-word is a word that requires of man an action: as "thou shalt
have no other gods." As regards the Lord's Supper, Luther now finds
that in
themselves Jesus' words at the Last Supper, "This is my body,"
are to be considered deed-words; they describe what Jesus did that
first time: "They are deed-words, which Christ speaks the first time,
and He does not lie when He says
'Take eat, this is my body, etc.,'
just as sun and moon were there when He said in Gen. 1: 'Let there be
sun and moon.' Thus His word is no powerless word but a word of power
which creates what it says. Ps. 33[:9]: 'He commanded
and it was
there.'"102 The first Lord's
Supper thus contained a powerful, creative word with the same power as
the word that once called forth the heavenly bodies.

Through the command of Christ to Christians, "Do this," the following

condition now arises: Since the deed-words are now included in the
command-words, they are no longer mere deed words, but also
command-words, for
everything happens which they command, by virtue of
the divine command-words through which they were spoken.103
The powerful deed-word in time past at the first communion has, through
the command-word, "Do this" been
entrusted to the Church in all times
as an ever-flowing source of the realization of the Real Presence. This
is Luther's doctrine of the consecration. The priest celebrating the
Sacrament takes into his mouth God's own creative word
and in so doing
works the miracle of the mass. To this Luther adds that the other
sacramental formulas (in Baptism and in Absolution) would without the
divine command remain empty formulas, but become, through the divine
institution which authorizes their repetition, powerful, efficacious
words: "yea, even if there were a command-word that I should say to
water 'this is wine,' you would see if it would not become wine."104
The Creator's right to have
the disposal of His creation can in
principle be transmitted to human beings without limitations, and also
the so-called natural miracles lie in the extension of the thought of
the power of consecration. In all of this it holds true that
human
action would remain empty and inefficacious, if God had not placed
Himself behind the action:

Here, too, if I pronounced the words "This is my body"

over all bread, nothing would happen. But when we, in accordance with
His institution and command, say in the Lord's Supper, "This is my
body," then it is His
body, not on account of our speaking or our
mighty word, but because He commanded us so to speak and to do and
bound His command and His action to our words.105

This reference to the fact that the Sacrament is celebrated in the

power of the first communion, which is contained in such expressions by
Luther, must not be understood in such a way that the words of
institution uttered in the liturgy
were to be emptied of their power.
Statements of this kind, which are also to be found in the Lutheran
Confessions,106
are merely an indication of the origin of the vein of water. Both in
Luther and in the Confessions there are
parallels to the different
orders of creation which now function by virtue of the words spoken in
Gen. 1; these parallels, which go back to John Chrysostomos and John
Damascene, are always based on the fact that, for instance, our
plowing
and sowing effect grain only by virtue of Gen. 1, but also on the fact
that the field would of course not bear any fruit without the action of
the peasant: "In like manner it happens with the Sacrament, we put
together water and
word, as He commands us, but this action of ours
does not effect Baptism, but the command and ordinance of Christ does."107
It should be observed that all of these parallels reckon with an
inserted link in between (rain and dew,
plowing and sowing, the
physical union in marriage) in order that Gen. 1 may reveal its power
in plant life, the harvest, in issue. The divine institution is what
has given our actions creative power. The relation between the first
communion and our Sacrament is similar: at the first communion Jesus'
creative word filled our present consecration with divine power.

Thus when in the Lutheran mass the priest utters the mighty, divine,
creative words, "This is my body," the possessive adjective "my" refers
to the fact that the consecrator is commissioned by Christ, is in His
person. If, however, the
celebrant alters Christ's commission and gives
it a different meaning, he goes out of Christ's person and speaks only
as a human being. Such a consecration occurs then only in the name of
the priest and has become an empty action,
without the decisive
authorization behind it. Christ is no longer heard in the words of
institution. The mere possession of the Christian pastoral office and
the uttering of the words of institution thus do not guarantee a valid
consecration. This powerless reciting of the words of institution on
one's own takes place, according to the certain conviction of Luther
and the Lutheran Confessions, on the one hand in the Roman private
mass, at which the
Sacrament is not distributed to any communicants;
and on the other hand in the Reformed communion service, where the Real
Presence is denied. The fact that the Roman private mass is excluded
from the ceremonies that are
sacramentally valid is usually accepted as
the given consequence of the criticism launched by the Reformation. One
should, however, be aware of the fact that it is not primarily the
omission of the communion that makes the Roman
private mass invalid. It
is rather the false sense which the priest puts into the words of
institution through which he reinterprets and stamps out the clear
words "take and eat," that makes the consecration a purely human act.
In quite
another way and disturbing to many is the rejection of all
celebrations of communion within the denominations to the left of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church. This hits also such churches which aim to
be somewhat like the Lutheran
church, even by rejecting a brutal,
superficial denial of the Real Presence but still not confessing it as
a clear and unambiguous doctrine. In this devastation, which like a
wind storm drove Jesus Christ from altars previously His in
many of the
Western European countries, Luther saw but the beginning of the
continued razing which would strike baptism, the doctrine of original
sin and Christology. As a prophetic prediction, Luther's opinion about
this has proved
true: the Reformed heresy became in history the point
of entry for Rationalism. Beyond this Luther discerned also the
dissolution of worldly government by the right of revolt; for he who
cannot understand the Divine Presence in the
sacramental species can
neither accept the fact that divine power has been given to sinful
human beings. Zwingli not only made fun of the most holy Sacrament, he
made fun of the titles of precedence of the German princely houses
as
well; in neither case could he understand how God conceals Himself in
external things. In Luther's eyes the last stage of the development is
that naked atheism will be born of such a superficial attitude towards
the works of
God.108

The rejection of the Reformed sacrament is especially clearly

pronounced in Luther's letter to the Christians in Frankfurt on the
Main from the year 1533. Here Luther turns against a church oriented
towards a theology of mediation
which in its teaching was close to that
of Martin Bucer, who in time was to contribute towards the Anglican
Church's taking a similar stand. The congregation in Frankfurt made
every effort to remain Lutheran in outward conformity
and used
traditional wordings: "in the Sacrament the body which Christ means is
given." They thus avoid accounting for the content of the biblical
expressions and, in the event that a Lutheran guest should be misled to
partake of the
communion of that church, he would be deceived and not
receive the true sacrament: "Now if a simple person hears this he
believes that they teach as we do and goes thereupon to the Sacrament
and receives nothing but bread and
wine."109
This fraudulent procedure presupposes a communion that is intact as far
as the externals are concerned: the words of institution are read, and
bread and wine are distributed. Nevertheless, the Holy Supper of the
New
Testament is non-existent here. The words of institution are thus
no guarantee, for by such words as theirs the words of Christ are taken
away.110 The right meaning is lacking.

In Luther's Large Confession on the Sacrament of the Altar he directly raises the accusation that our enthusiasts do not consecrate.111
But at the same time, Luther reckons with the fact that the words of
institution are read at the bread
breaking ceremonies of the
enthusiasts. Ridiculing them he says that they might just as well sing
an ascension hymn (in order to express more clearly the Real Absence).
Hence what is lacking is not the words, but the right meaning.
At the
end of the Large Confession, we find Luther's spiritual will
and testament with a short explanation of the main data of the faith,
and there it is said that the Sacrament is valid regardless of the
priest: "For it is not based on the
faith or unbelief of human beings
but on God's word and institution. If only one does not undertake first
to change and misinterpret God's word and institution, as the present
enemies of the Sacrament do. These have indeed mere
common bread and
wine, for they have neither God's word nor His institution but they
have turned and changed these in accordance with their own imagination."112
What is referred to is thus not an external, ritual happening which
in
some way has been maimed, but the Reformed doctrine on the Sacrament
which changes the meaning of the words of Christ so that nothing
remains of them but an empty shell, the mere articulation. This
demarcation in Luther's
testament on the question of the validity of
the Sacrament has been taken into the Lutheran Confessions.113
This rejection involves, however, only such cases where the priest in
his preaching denies or at least does not clearly teach
the Real
Presence. On the other hand the priest whose teaching is orthodox, but
who is secretly Reformed in his heart, still consecrates in the person
of Christ, but as soon as he professes his error as to the Sacrament,
he cannot effect a
Sacrament.114

Thus for Luther there does not exist any unarticulated, religious,
Christian Word in general. For him the Biblicism which in principle
lets the word of the Bible replace a dogmatic examination of the
meaning of the words is an
expression of Satanic intellectual laziness.
Confronted by wordings such as "the body that Christ means"--real or
symbolic, present or absent--Luther writes: "Where there are such
preachers, they do not need the Scripture and
studying any more, for
they can say in all points: Dear people, be now satisfied, believe what
Christ means, that is enough. Who would not want to be one of their
disciples?"115
The flight from theoretical things is a flight into sin and
dishonesty.
We shall never get beyond the theoretical problem as to what is meant,
what is taught and what is said. The Sacraments do not offer us
another, allegedly deeper reality than the tangibles of the doctrine
and do not open the
door into the mystic in the sense of something
which is not accounted for or articulated.

The biblical Sacrament of the Altar stands and falls with the
consecration. It is therefore entirely natural that Luther on an
occasion when a priest distributed an unconsecrated host at mass
expressed his condemnation: "Let him go to
his Zwinglians."116
This blasphemous procedure of daring to consider consecrated and
unconsecrated hosts to be the same thing, of course resulted in
extensive church discipline proceedings. Only after it was revealed
that the erring
country priest had acted in confusion was the threat of
expatriation turned into a milder sentence of a short term in prison.
That is how great the zeal of the Reformation times was for the
consecration which Jesus Christ entrusted to
Christians to use and to
defend. Of course Luther also reckons with the necessity of using a new
consecration (nachkonsekration) if the consecrated elements are insufficient and new elements must be taken in to the altar.117
It is by
the retention of such things which outsiders must deem
trivialities that loyalty to Christian revelation is tested and proved.

96 ST III:78, ST III:64,3.

97 WA 45:184.23.

98 Otto Hof, Taufe und Heilsverk bei Luther, Festgabe far Professor D. Peter Brunner. Zur Auferbauung des Leibes Christi, Kassel 1965, 231 with polemics against Regin Prenter, whose theology builds upon the contrary view.

99 By failing to mention the

doctrine of consecration as a biblical, revelatory truth, it was
possible for Peter Brunner, who is commonly counted among the defenders
of the Real Presence, to be united with the deniers of the
Sacrament of
the modernistic-Calvinistic kind, who have produced the so-called
Arnoldshainer Thesen, cf. Brunner's own words in Die dogmatische und kirchliche Bedeutung des Ertrages des Abendmahlsgesprachs i Lehrgesprach
uber das heilige Abendmahl,
hrsg. v. Gottfried Niemeier, Munchen 1961, 110. Also the orthodox part
of American Lutheranism often shows the same deviation, concerning the
meaning and importance of the consecration.

100 WA 26:287.4ff. (LW 37:187).

101 WA 26:282.20ff. (LW 37:180).

102 WA 26:283.2ff. (LW 37:181).

103 WA 26:284.1ff. (LW 37:183).

104 WA 26:284.22ff. (LW 37:183).

105 WA 26:285.13ff. (LW 37:184).

106 Tappert, 583 (SD VII.75, 76).

107 WA 38:242.4ff. (LW 38:202).

108 WA 23:69.23ff. (LW 37:16), WA30i:220.4ff.

( Tappert, 444, [LC IV.60]). The origin of the Reformed heresy is,
however, the Roman modernism, in the way that Erasmus of Rotterdam is
at the same time inspiring Zwingli and
atheism, WA Br6:2076, WA TR 5:5670.

109 WA 30iii:559.7ff.

110 WA 26:389.14 (LW 37:260).

111 An Open Letter to Those in Frankfurt on the Main, 1533, tr. Jon D. Vieker, Concordia Journal 16:4 (October 1990) 335.4.

112 WA 30iii:564.6ff. (Vieker, 340.18). WA 26:506.25ff. (LW 37:367).

113 Tappert, 574f. (SD VII.32).

114 WA TR 4:5184.5ff.

115 WA 30iii:562.14ff. (Vieker, 338.14).

116 WA Br 11:4186.8.

117 WA Br 10:3762.18ff.
It is very misleading, when present Swedish theological training makes
the students believe that Luther did not demand nachkonsekration.
Ragnar Holte, in 1962, rightly said about this: "Such a statement
testifies to a feeble insight into (I hope not lack of respect for?)
historical facts," "Luthersk nattvardslara in ljuset av nyare exegetik
och patristik" in Valsignelsens kalk edited by Eric Segelberg, Saltsjobaden 1962, 81, note 10.

VI. The Sacrament Is The Body And Blood Of Christ--Not The Whole Christ

Perhaps this particular point may be considered especially unspiritual

and unworthy, so that the analysis of the compass of the Real Presence
appears like a playground for theologians with sticky fingers who push
their way into areas
that ought to be too holy for speculative thought.
This suspicion is not necessarily unfounded, and this very fact makes
it necessary to point out very exactly the limitations that are set for
our thoughts and words.

As late as the eleventh century it was said within Latin Christendom,

in connection with Christ's own words, that the content of the
sacramental gift was the body and blood of Christ, while the reception
of the whole Christ was to be
the result of the communicants being
incited by the Sacrament to strive after the spiritual life which is
Christ in His divinity and His humanity. This reflects the old
conviction that the Sacrament is best defined by Christ Himself who
said only: This is my body, This is my blood. The partaking of the
whole Christ is one of the promises which is also apart from the
Sacrament and is directed to faith: We shall come unto him and make our
abode with him (John
14:23).

Medieval scholasticism, which reached its climax in the thirteenth

century, took this later reality into the theology of the Sacrament
itself. Through concomitance (in Latin, per concomitantiam)
Christ's divinity is also in the elements
according to Thomas Aquinas,
for His divinity and humanity can never be separated. This proposition
appears to be biblical and reasonable. Nevertheless, within the
Ockhamist school we find the beginnings of a denial of this
proposition. The background of this protest seems to be that it was
feared that such wording could be construed to mean that, just as
Christ's body takes a real place in the consecrated host, the
omnipresent Godhead would be thought
of as inscribed in space. In
Luther, who evidently follows up the Ockhamistic argumentation here,
this is worded very graphically: "Let the hairsplitters and the
faithless sophists search for such unsearchable things and conjure the
divinity into the sacrament."118
Hence nothing may be allowed to suggest the idea that the immovable,
omnipresent God is concentrated to a point of creation by virtue of the
consecration. The body of Christ can indeed have both of
these
relationships, omnipresence and a particular presence in Palestine,
presence in heaven and presence in the Sacrament. However, the Godhead
remains in eternity the one with whom is not variableness, neither
shadow of turning
(James 1:17). This is not only the insight of
philosophers but also that of the Reformers and of all classical
Christian theology. That God became man, that He came down from heaven,
etc., has of course never meant a change of such
a kind that the
divinity was contracted to the point where Jesus' body was. What
happened in the womb of Mary at the moment of the annunciation is
rather that the human soul and body of Jesus were lifted up into the
person of the
Eternal Word and possessed in it God's relation to
creation. The divine nature is not changed; the new thing that happens
happens to the human nature. The concentration which occurs is that it
can be said of this human being alone
that He is God. All of the great
Christian theologians have been in agreement about the fact that also
prior to the incarnation, the Godhead was present in the Virgin's womb
as He is present everywhere in all space; the Godhead did
not have to
go to Mary. "The body...born of Mary" ("Gott sei gelobet," The Lutheran Hymnal, 313) went instead into the Godhead.

This orthodox understanding of the meaning of the incarnation makes it

possible in principle to give the word concomitance a meaning that is
acceptable. Then concomitance would only mean that the miracle of the
incarnation is
indissoluble and inerasable, that the body and blood of
Christ in the Sacrament rests in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity
as also in Palestine and in heaven. The divinity of Christ in its
invariable omnipresence, of course, draws
nigh in the Sacrament in the
same way as it could walk into a Jewish home through the door of the
house at the beginning of our calendar by virtue of the personal union.
This personal union means that just as Christ was crucified
when the
body of Christ was nailed to the cross, it is in like manner correct to
teach that Christ rests upon the altar on which His body lies, yea,
that the Godhead is grasped by the hands of the celebrant when the body
of God is
consecrated and distributed. Nevertheless, it is not a
question of a divinity which has been conjured into the Sacrament.

Most basically the problem with concomitance is that the formulation

and dogmatization of this teaching in the medieval church gave it the
character of saying more than the fundamental Christological dogma of
the inseparable union
of the two natures. In order to render meaningful
the doctrine accepted by the church, human thought seemed to be
directed to operate with categories which threatened the exaltedness of
the Godhead. Concomitance does not become
reasonable and acceptable
until the insight is gained that this teaching is unnecessary and
meaningless. It is a well-known fact that this teaching was in time
used as a defense for the custom of distributing only the body of
Christ to the
communicants at mass. The argumentation used by the Roman
Church in order to preserve this usage119
does not in principle depart from the concomitance of the Godhead: here
it is only a question of the presence of the blood of
Christ in the
body of Christ, so that the latter is thought to give the gifts of both
species in one of them. For Luther the essential thing here is that he
rejects the notion that the clear order of Scripture may be abrogated,
even if this
argumentation were correct: Even if it were true that as
much is included under one form as under both, yet administration in
one form is not the whole order and institution as it was established
and commanded by Christ.120
Luther's
way of arguing here is directed against the idea that
religious needs are a norm for how the Church should read Scripture.
Even if the communicant were to receive the gifts of both species in
one, it is still clear that he would not have
received the whole
institution of Christ. This is the decisive issue. The argument of the
concomitance of the Godhead has here, too, a certain parallel validity.
For Lutherans, too, it is clear that the body and blood are no longer
separated as they were in death--just as little as divinity and
humanity were ever separated in Christ. The resurrected Christ took his
life back again. In order to counter the accusation of a dead,
bloodless body of Christ in the mass, the
Lutheran Confessions write:
"We are talking about the presence of the living Christ, knowing that
death no longer has dominion over him(Romans 6:9)."121
This does not, however, prevent the special sacramental presence (with
its
special sacramental form of existence) from being extended only to
hold true of what Christ says the bread and the wine are respectively.
This does not mean that the Lamb is slaughtered again before the face
of the Father in such a
way that body and blood are separated. The
exalted Lamb freely exercises His freedom to let His body alone be
present under the bread and His blood alone be present under the wine.
Their union in the resurrected life in the face of
the Father does not
form an obstacle to different elements being consecrated to convey them
to the Church here on earth. Luther says about this: "Who has commanded
us to put more into the Sacrament than what is given by the clear
and
plain words of Christ? Who has made you certain that this conclusion
[the concomitance] is true? How do you know what God can do?"122

Nowadays the wording "the whole Christ" usually occurs in a frame

entirely different from that of medieval scholasticism. The formula
"the whole Christ" has a great attraction for modern theology, which
would like to dispense with
the Real Presence. "The whole Christ" is
the presence of grace in the Word, given to faith, and the presence
which is true of every service: "Where two or three are gathered
together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Since
the words
of institution are a part of the preaching of the Word and are not only
consecrating, and since the distribution is often accompanied by
so-called words of distribution, it is always possible to let the
Word's conveyance of the
general presence treacherously replace the
sacramental presence constituted by the fact that the bread and wine
are the body and blood of Christ. Already in Melanchthon's
interpretation of the words of institution, Bible words about
the
general presence started getting mixed in, and the whole Christ was
formulated as a rejection of the Lutheran wording, the body and blood
of Christ. This tradition, which lays claim to the exclusive title of
satisfying the needs of
piety for a personal meeting with God, was
handed down by Melanchthon's followers, the old and new Philippists
within the Pietistic, Liberal tradition. For this reason it is not
unimportant to decline all turgid, pious talk about Christ
and to bring
all discussions about the Sacrament back to Jesus words, "This is my
body."

118 WA 11:450.13ff. (LW 36:297)

119 The fact that lay people

today can, in certain circumstances, receive the chalice in the Roman
mass changes nothing in the controversy which has existed between
Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism for centuries. The
controversy has
always been about the question of whether the chalice has to be
distributed at mass, not if it may be distributed. Even during the
sixteenth century the distribution of the chalice was admitted in some
places within the
Church of Rome. It is typical of a superficial way of
looking at things to conclude from a liturgical similarity, which has
appeared now, that the doctrinal controversy has been settled.

120 WA 50:242.17ff. Tappert, 311f (SA III/VI.3).

121 Tappert, 180 (Ap X.4).

122 WA 26:606ff.

VII. The Sacrament Is Adorable And Extended In Time

Although Latin Christology as early as in the twelfth century generally

denied that the body of Christ was adorable, the sacramental adoration
in the mass nevertheless remained established during the Middle Ages.
It was given a
threadbare theoretical motivation by the fact that the
adoration could be said to be directed to the Godhead that was present
in the Sacrament by concomitance. Not until the Lutheran Reformation
returned to Cyrillian Christology did
the adoration of the Sacrament
again receive its natural motivation. The human nature of Christ
participates in the attributes of the divine nature and receives
without any limitations joyous adoration from the congregation
celebrating
mass. The scholastic wall of separation between the Creator
and His humanity has fallen. That Luther himself practiced, taught and
defended the adoration of the Sacrament is a fact that is almost
unanimously confirmed by research
scholars; albeit the fact is often
lamented. What is not known is the fact that Lutheranism engaged in a
controversy over this question up until the time the Lutheran
confessional writings were finally completed, and that the feast of
the
victory of genuine Lutheranism over Philippism was celebrated in one of
the German principalities with prayers for the preservation of the
doctrine of justification and the doctrine of the adoration of the
Sacrament.123 One of the
co-authors of the Formula of Concord
took his doctorate with a disputation on, among other things, the
adoration of the Sacrament, and this disputation took place in the
presence of another one of the co-authors of the Book of
Concord.124
Of course, this was never meant as an attempt to conceal the nature of
the Sacrament as a means of grace, its attribute of being first and
foremost a gift of God to man. However, with this the role of the
Sacrament had
never been exhausted; rather, a spring had been found
which gave rise to praise and thanksgiving as well.

In a special book entitled Concerning the Adoration of the Sacrament,

Luther examined very carefully the adoration of the Sacrament. The
adoration may, according to Luther, be executed in an outward and an
inward way. The
outward way consists of kneeling, genuflecting and
bowing. Luther knows that such conduct has its counterpart in the court
ceremony in the presence of princes and that it is thus not reserved
exclusively for the King of Kings in the
Sacrament of the Altar. The
inward adoration which must be added to make the adoration Christian is
a veneration or bowing of the heart, through which you from the bottom
of your heart confess and show that you are His obedient
creation. This
inward adoration presupposes saving faith: the hearty trust and the
confidence of the true living faith.125 It can even be considered the highest work of faith towards God.126
In itself this worshipping of the Creator can
also occur outside of the
Sacrament and without any special outward gestures. Man can be
overwhelmed by God anywhere.

This adoration of the Sacrament is designated by Luther as an

adiaphoron that can be practiced but need not be. This does not mean
that Luther would in any sense allow anyone to proclaim openly that the
adoration is inadmissible.
He who believes what one ought to believe,
as has been proven here, can indeed not deny the body and blood of
Christ his veneration without committing a sin.127
However since the time has not yet come when the Christians only
task
will be to worship God, what is of immediate importance is that
adoration occur when there is time and opportunity.128
The apostles, e.g., remained seated at the first celebration of the
Lord's Supper, forgetting both the adoration
and the reverence.129
This is due to the fact that the words teach you to pay attention and
to find out why Christ is there and cause you to forget your own works
and only wait for His works.130
Just as when one hears the Gospel,
God's Word, to which belongs the
highest honor, because God is closer in it than Christ is in the bread
and wine, yet one forgets to bow before it and sits still and does not
think about how one is to show it honor.131
This is the
alternative to adoration: faith busy with the forgiveness
of sins that is contained in the body and blood of Christ and
proclaimed in the words of institution.

Luther then divides the communicants into four groups as regards the
adoration of the Sacrament. The first group acts as the apostles did at
the first celebration and clings to faith in the forgiveness of sins in
accordance with the words
of institution, omitting the adoration: These
are the most secure and the best.132
The second group consists of those who exercised in this faith advance
to their own deeds and adore Christ spiritually in the Sacrament, i.e.,
in the
depths of their hearts they bow before Him and acknowledge Him
as their Lord who works everything in them and outwardly they bend and
bow and fall on their knees with their bodies in order to prove their
inward adoration.133
The third
group consists of those who adore without any outward gestures. The
fourth group adores with gestures only, and that is hypocrisy. Luther
showed how this happens under the Papacy, where, since there is no
enlightenment
through the Word to create faith, there is only an
outward, human veneration, to the disgrace of Christ.134 Summarizing, Luther says,

Nevertheless you see that it is not without danger to

adore this Sacrament where the Word and faith are not urged, so that I
would almost contend that it would be better not to adore, as in the
case of the apostles, as is
customary with us. Not that it might be
wrong to adore, but in the former case the danger is less than in the
latter that nature will easily rely on its own works and let God's
works remain without consideration, and this the
Sacrament cannot
tolerate. But what more shall I say? There must be Christians to use
the Sacrament to do the works of God. Where there are not any, it will
be wrong whether they adore or not.135

In other words, everything that is to occur requires true Christian

faith, and wherever there is none, everything will be awry. Hence
adoration is really no more risky than all other works; there is always
a risk that these, too, may be
taken into the service of
self-righteousness. What Luther almost thinks, is to be taken as a
warning against letting the Sacrament become a splendid liturgical
pageant that drowns its character as a means of grace. The historical
explanation is the Roman sacramental practice which was separated from
the Word and justification, profaning the Sacrament of the Church in
the streets and squares, to the entertainment of the ignorant masses,
not even
understanding in the sanctuary what Christ's innermost
intention in the Sacrament was.

It is by no means unimportant to underscore that Luther does not make

justification by faith into a narrow, regulative compulsory principle
which dictates what the communicant is allowed to do. Certainly Christ
was not on earth to be
served but to serve, but He never rejected
faith's spontaneous adoration which came from the three kings at the
cradle, the blind and many others.136
Justification by faith and the conveying of grace in the Sacrament are
to qualify the
Christian action in the Sacrament through giving the
gift of the Spirit, but they do not become a pedantic pointing out of
what a Christian may or may not do. If you rightly practice faith in
the first point, namely belief in the words,
the adoration of the
Sacrament will easily follow by itself, and if it does not follow, this
would not be a sin.137 Here the freedom of the Christian reigns.

However, it must be added that the very concept of faith itself as used
by Luther tends to include an element of adoration. Faith means a trust
in the fact that Christ has overcome guilt in His assumed human nature,
faith is the right
adoration, my believing that His body and blood are
present, given and shed for me.138
In the face of the slaughtered Lamb of God under the species of the
Sacrament, the Christian stands overwhelmed and puts his trust in that
only
which is the source of all salvation. This trust which considers
the body and blood of Christ to be the greatest gift of God is in
itself adoration, not because it gives rise to thanksgiving and
adoration as ensuing effects, but because it
itself gives God His
greatest homage: faith in His forgivng omnipotence in the sacrifice of
the new covenant.

Just a few months before his death, Luther still proclaims his
spontaneous and unrestrained confession to the adoration of the
Sacrament: "In the venerable Sacrament of the Altar, which one is to
worship with all honor, the natural
body and blood of the Lord Jesus
Christ is veritably given and received, both by the worthy and the
unworthy."139
The words "is to" can hardly be intended to abrogate what was said
above concerning the communicants freedom to
act in accordance with
whatever his devotion bids him to do. Luther's wording is, despite its
pointedness, actually completely self-evident. Also that faith, which
devotes itself entirely to the miracle of the forgiveness of sins in
the
sacrifice of Calvary which is proffered, realizes that it is
receiving the adorable Savior in the host and in the wine and would not
in any way wish to deny that all adoration, praise and honor are due
Jesus in His Sacrament. Particularly
in view of the fact that this
adoration is attacked by those people who deny the miracle of the
Presence, the free ceremony spontaneously becomes a necessity, and
professing the Real Presence thus procures for itself the desirable
profile through the words about the adorable Sacrament, described in
Latin by Luther's own pen as eucharistia venerabilis & adorabilis.

Ever since the high Middle Ages, adoration had within Latin Christendom
been in a special sense combined with the elevation, the priests'
lifting up, first, the consecrated wafer, and then the consecrated
chalice. For centuries a
powerful wave of prayers and thanksgivings
have streamed forth to the Eucharistic Savior thus elevated. Luther
personally put himself in this tradition without any misgivings, and
the two princely brothers, the Princes of Anhalt, who
themselves
worshiped the Sacrament, are witnesses to Luther's behavior at mass:
"We have seen Luther throw himself on the floor with earnest and with
reverence and worship Christ when the Sacrament was elevated."140 In both of
his orders for the mass Luther retains the elevation. In the simpler form, the Deutsche Messe, the elevation is carried out during the German Sanctus, which is printed in The Lutheran Hymnal
under the title "Isaiah Mighty Seer, in
Days of Old." In this majestic
hymn, which closes with the words, "The beams and lintels trembled at
the cry, And clouds of smoke enwrapped the throne on high," the
conviction is expressed that the city church of Wittenberg is the
site
of the same revelation of the Lord Sabbaoth as was the temple of
Jerusalem. "We retain the elevation for the sake of the Sanctus of Isaiah, for this is well in accord with the elevation. For it praises in song His sitting on the throne
and His ruling."141

The abolition of the elevation in Wittenberg in 1542 is not Luther's doing.142

Of course, Luther had never considered the elevation a necessity--the
rite was at the time hardly 300 years old--and under certain premises
he could both
accept and defend its abolition. Soon, however, there are
testimonies to the effect that Luther thought that the abolition of
elevation had lessened the authority of the Sacrament.143
Luther himself writes: "And if the time perhaps
comes someday which
gives reason to elevate [the Sacrament], it is free and without peril
to elevate again."144 "If it
comes to the point that the elevation becomes necessary again in order
to avoid heresy or other things, we shall
establish it again."145 When the Lutheran Confessions speak of the freedom to re-establish certain ceremonies which have been abolished146
it was, as should be noted, the intention of one of the co-authors,
Nicolaus Selneccer, that
this refer precisely to the freedom to
re-establish the elevation in accordance with the words of Luther
quoted above.147 The
resistance which the elevation runs up against nowadays confirms very
much its necessity, and the fact that
the time about which Luther and
Selneccer spoke has now come. The rejection of the elevated Sacrament
generally proves to be a flight from the Real Presence, the power of
the consecration and the demands of objective religion to
remain
independent from the pious human subject.

As was shown in the chapter on consecration (Chapter V), the spoken,

divine Word effects the presence: therewith it is also stated that no
time can be inserted between the uttering of the words and their
fulfillment: "For as soon as
Christ says, 'This is my body,' His body
is there through the word and in the power of the Holy Ghost; if the
word is not there, it is ordinary bread, but if the word is added, the
words effect that about which they speak."148
Considering the parallel drawn by Luther several times between the
consecration and the creative words in the first chapter of the Bible,
we may very well say that he leaves as little delay for the truth of
the words of the Sacrament as
he would admit that the power of the
words of creation would be made compatible with waiting for millions of
years for the completion of the work of creation. In both cases we are
confronted with the irresistible words, "He bid and
it stood there"
(Psalm 33:9).

The reality which flows forth from God's creative words cannot lightly
be made to cease merely because the communicants have completed their
communion. In two extensive letters to Simon Wolferinus, Luther attacks
that man's
teaching and practice according to which the presence ceased
with the communion itself, for which reason the priest could without
reproach mix consecrated and unconsecrated elements after mass. This
error cast unhappy shadows
over Luther's old age, and Wolferinus is to
be considered equivalent to a Zwinglian. Of course Luther does not wish
to claim here that the bread carried around in the Roman sacramental
procession or the bread reserved in the
sacramental tabernacle was a
valid Sacrament, the true body of Christ. Such things are outside the
institution of Christ, which speaks of a meal. Within this meal, which
is the mass, the Sacrament is, however, a sacrament with all the
consequences of this fact. The meal of Christ lasts until all have
received the Sacrament, drunk of the chalice and eaten up the pieces of
bread.149 What remains after the end of the communion (reliqua or reliquiae)
is therefore
consecrated by Christ to be His holy body and blood and is
to be received carefully and with reverence by the priest or another
person as Sacrament. For Luther it is thus a dogmatic demand that in
the mass everything that has been
consecrated is to be consumed. This
abolished both the possibility of the Roman abuse of carrying the host
from the altar as a Sacrament and the possibility of the Protestant
abuse of treating the remaining elements as mere bread and
wine. These
two Luther letters were quoted diligently by the following generation
of Gnesio-Lutherans. Evidently the Lutheran Confessions, too, refer to
these letters in the discussion about the extension of the Sacrament in
time,
although the fact that the reference to the page number was
omitted hence made this reference somewhat unclear.150

We are also in possession of historical sources which show clearly that

the remaining elements were consumed in the Lutheran churches of those
days so that nothing was left over.151
Likewise we know that in Electoral Saxony,
Luther's own country, wine
was used for rinsing the chalice, i.e., unconsecrated wine was poured
into the empty chalice in order to remove every trace of the holy thing
that had been contained therein.152
It may be assumed that the
peculiarly Lutheran custom of the celebrants
often communing last was due to the concern for the consecrated
elements. The priest can then without its being noticed carry out the
complete consumption, and he is thus not dependent
upon the last
communicants who may have difficulty in judging when they should render
assistance in this way.153

As was already emphasized above, this teaching and this way of doing
things does not in any way mean that the Roman customs of the
sacramental procession and the tabernacle are rendered legitimate. On
the contrary, they are now
rendered completely impossible. Every
attempt to take the presence out of the meal is in any event combined
with uncertainty and doubt, and nothing that is not absolutely certain
is to be believed at all. Thus, if in the Lutheran mass
by an accident
or, as was the case with Wolferinus, by an intentional, dogmatically
objectionable procedure, the elements are put outside the use (extra usum),
they lose their Biblical significance. What should be done with such
elements depends entirely on the judgment of the individual. Luther
himself suggested that they should be burned. On the basis of Luther's
views on such matters, one may say that such occurrences are so deeply
disturbing for the
sincere faith in the mystery of the Sacrament of the
Altar that they ought not become known when and if they occur. Normal
discharge of the pastoral office does not ordinarily need to be
confronted with any such problems. To
consecrate such a large quantity
of wine that it cannot reasonably be consumed is a sign of grave
disorderliness and unwillingness to go to the trouble of finding out
the number of communicants, which for Luther is an almost
necessary
prerequisite for the celebration of the mass, motivated already by the
general church discipline practiced in connection with communion.
Letting the elements remain undistributed the way Wolferinus did passes
the borders
of what is merely disorderly and is given a worse
appellation: "I believe that you are operating with Zwinglis
insanities."154

When Luther in this way draws borderlines between himself and what is
outside of the use, he is not drawing borderlines within the action
commanded by Christ, from the consecration to the distribution of the
last particle and the last
drop. If, within the mass commanded by
Christ, the chalice is accidentally spilled, this misfortune has
happened to the true blood of Christ; Luther speaks of how such an
accident, which is not necessarily due to any sin, is followed
by great
fear and trembling in the good Christian.155
We are also informed as to how Luther actually acted. Such an accident
occurred at the distribution of communion in the town church at
Wittenberg in the year 1542, when Luther
and the officiating pastor and
the deacon, with the greatest reverence and in deep excitement,
attempted to consume the poured out blood of Christ from the floor of
the sanctuary. The witness writes: "This accident touched Doctor
Martin's heart so profoundly that he sighed about it and said: 'Oh God,
help!' His eyes were also full of tears."156
After mass Luther, following medieval precedent, had a chair, on which
the Sacrament had been spilled, planed off and
the wood shavings burned
together with pieces of cloth that had likewise been involved. This
story is told also by the leading theologians of the Formula of
Concord, who express their approval.157
They were capable of taking
cognizance of and highly valuating the same
fact which Hermann Sasse has worded in our day, "Perhaps no Catholic
ever had such reverence for the miracle of the Real Presence as Luther
did. No one could think more highly of the
consecration, no one could
treat the consecrated elements more reverently."158

If our present age feels that these thoughts and actions are foreign,
this is not due to a greater love towards God and His Sacrament or a
better understanding of the Word of God. Rather this is due to homemade
ideas about what is
appropriate for God and due to a muddy hope that
development also in religious matters will lift man above the cover of
the physical. People want to leave the dark ages of religion behind
them and elevate themselves to a higher level
with better conditions,
not weighed down by orders of creation, which can be detected in the
functions of the human body, freed from the ballast of historical and
geographical data given in Biblical history, relieved of dogmatical
propositions about a God who is carried on a silver paten. Such a
flight into the heavens has, however, always ended with a fall towards
the abyss with scorched wings. The rules for God's doings and for our
table manners at His altar
are decided by God alone. This is one of the
points where it is revealed whether or not man can disregard all kinds
of subjective practicalities, including his need for salvation as the
biblical filter, and instead meet God on His
conditions. We shall not
get any theologians in the real sense of the word until they have bent
backs like the selfsame Luther, who had no qualms about seeking God in
even the lowliest things.

Also in this point of the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar there
has been a long history of resistance. It is no exaggeration to say
that Melanchthon and his followers, the Philippists, with dreadful
malice attacked what we have
portrayed above. The strange thing is that
the judgments they passed on their opponents were simply accepted by
later research. A presentation of history tinted in this way gave rise
to the myth about the peacefulness of Philippism
and the
quarrelsomeness of Gnesio-Lutheranism. The real truth is that
Philippism always and consistently represents hateful arrogance in the
same way the more educated and enlightened person always thinks that he
has the right to
show such arrogance in dealing with the uneducated,
vulgar worshipper of idols. Melanchthon directed this accusation
literally against his Lutheran opponents.159
On the other hand, the Philippists were always the ones who were
anxious about church unity with the Gnesio-Lutherans, who were not
willing to have such a form of ecclesiastical co-existence.

The great controversy about consecration, adoration and the reliquiae

of the Sacrament was fought out seriously after Melanchthon's death. It
spread to many quarters: in Sweden, in East Prussian, and in the
Hanseatic towns of
Northern Germany. In the city of Danzig, which was
dominated by the Philippists, the Lutherans, even on their death beds,
refrained from taking communion from ministers who did not teach that
the leftovers had the character of
being the Sacrament or tolerated
such a teaching among their colleagues. The matter was not resolved
when the Philippists offered to follow Lutheran practice without
accepting the Lutheran doctrine. Reverence could, the Philippists
thought, be a good reason for consuming the reliquiae, and they
made reference to the passover lamb in the Old Testament where such
directives were given. This reverence, which in modern terminology
would be called almost high
church, was not sufficient in the eyes of
struggling Lutheranism. What the Lutherans wanted was not ceremony but
teaching, not a church-political solution, but the unity of the Spirit
around the words of Christ.160

The teaching at issue here must be penetrated somewhat further. The

Philippists would not simply say that the presence was limited to the
act of receiving communion. This wording is probably a late innovation
and belongs rather to
the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century.
Instead, the Philippists claimed that it is first the reception of the
elements that legitimizes the total action as being sacramental.
Philippism reckoned with a Real Presence and with the fact
that Jesus
had promised to give His body in the Lord's Supper, even in, with and
under bread and wine. On the other hand, Philippism did not wish to
concede that Jesus declared that the bread "is" His body (panem esse corpus).
That
is why Philippism thought it was sufficient that Christ fulfills
His promise, that the communicants really receive the promised gift,
etc. Here lies the essential point, the status controversiae.
For the Lutherans, Christ had made the
bread His body through the
consecration and commanded us to eat it; for the Philippists, Christ
had promised to give His body if one ate the bread. Not without reason,
the Philippists drew from this premise the conclusion that the
Sacrament was an act, not a thing, and that if the bread were not
eaten, Christ would have no reason to fulfill His promise for a
non-existent communicant. In this case the words of Jesus have no
direct connection with the bread, the
only role of which is to render
it possible for the promise to be fulfilled for the communicant.
Logically this is an easily comprehensible construction, which shies at
the words, "This [bread] is my body," finding this interpretation too
literal,161 but which at the
same time wishes to retain a church tradition that has decisive values
for devotional life. The Melanchthonian school's attempts to find a
solution have exercised an obvious attraction in all ages. In our own
times, too, we are presented with trickily written documents that speak
of Jesus' presence and Jesus' gift, but tell us nothing about what the
consecrated elements are and what Jesus said. What we least of all are
told is that the body
and blood of Christ are, by virtue of the
consecration, resting on the altar, that they are adorable and that
they must be consumed so that nothing is left over. True faith in
Jesus' words of institution cannot, given time to ponder, hesitate
about the answers to these questions. In an age when what is at issue
is (as it was at the time of the Formula of Concord was
written) to unite split and divided groups within Lutheranism in a
genuine doctrinal unity, those who are to
be led together cannot be
without agreement on this important point. The common celebration of
the Sacrament of the Altar which is yearned for must occur with a
common adoration of and with a common reverence for the holy
things
that are entrusted to our hands

123 Gustav Kawerau, Johann Agricola von Eisleben, 326.

124 Andreas Musculus, Propositiones de vera, reali et substantiali praesentia, Corporis & Sanguinis IESU Christi in Sacramento Altaris,
Francofordiae ad Oderam, 1573. Christofer Cornernus' disputation took
place under the
presidency of Musculus, who can be regarded as one of
the warmest defenders of sacramental adoration and who edited prayer
books with the classical hymns for the adoration of the Sacrament.

125 WA 11:446.23f. (LW 36:293).

126 WA 11:446.17f. (LW 36 293)

127 WA 11 447 7f (LW 36 294)

128 WA 11 448 1f (LW 36 294)

129 WA 11 448 31f (LW 36 295f )

130 WA 11 448 27f (LW 36 295)

131 WA 11 449 19ff (LW 36 296)

132 WA 11 449 15f (LW 36 296)

133 WA 11 449 19ff (LW 36 296)

134 WA 11 444 24ff (LW 36 291)

135 WA 11 449 29ff (LW 36 297)

136 WA 11 447 27f (LW 36 294)

137 WA 11 449 7ff (LW 36 296)

138 WA Br 2 555 24f

139 WA 54 432 1ff (LW 34 355)

140 WA r 5 308 15ff The pr n ng n WA s fau y and has been correc ed by a scho ars who have rea ed he ex A "noswehas" wrong y become a "nonno "

141 WA Br 3 942 Be age 76ff

142 A de a ed descr p on s found n Kar n Hass er Lu her och e eva onen na vardsmassan Kyrk g Fornye se 1960 No 12

143 WA TR 5 308 9ff

144 WA Br 10 3762 25f

145 WA Br 10 3849 17f

146 Tapper 612 (SD X 9)

147 N co aus Se neccer Reverend ss m e us r ss m Pr nc p s e Dom n Dom n Georg Pr nc ps Anha n ac ver Ep scop Sen en ae L ps ae 1579 61

148 WA 19 491 13ff (LW 36 341)

149 WA Br 10 3894 27ff For a comp e e Eng sh rans a on of h s correspondence see E F Pe ers "Ex ra Usum Nu um Sacramen um The Or g n and Mean ng of he Ax om No h ng Has he Charac er of a Sacramen Ou s de of
he Use n S x een h-Cen ury and Seven een h-Cen ury Lu heran Theo ogy " ThD d ss Concord a Sem nary a S Lou s 1968 201-15

150 Tapper 584 (SD VII 84) Cf B arne W Te gen The Case of he Los Lu her Reference (pos ed on SR)

151 Kawerau Der S re uber d e Re qu ae Sacramen n E s eben 1543 n Ze schr ur K rchengesch ch e 33 Band 295ff Theodor Ko de Ana ec a u herana Go ha 1883 217

152 Ib d

153 Cer a n o der Lu heran urg es however have he pr es s commun on f rs accord ng o he Roman pa ern and no ob ec on can be ra sed aga ns ha order wh ch has been rev ved a e y

154 WA Br 10 3894

155 WA 26 595 31ff

156 Johann Hachenburg W der denn rr humb der newen zw ng aner Errfurd 1557 fo F a f

157 H s or e des Sacramen ass re s (Se neccer K rchner Chemn z) s 1 1591 610

158 Sasse Th s s My Body 176 2nd ed 142

159 Corpus Re orma orum Ha e 1834-1879 9 626

160 The con roversy n Danz g s descr bed by Gus ave Ko z D e Danz ger Konkord en orme uber das he ge Abendmah No e genann under hre Apo og e (1561-1567) K n gsberg Pr 1901

161 Pau Eber Vom he gen Sacramen des Le bs und B u s unsers Herrn Jesus Chr s W enberg 1563 150 Eber he Ph pp s c pas or of W enberg suppor ed h s fe owbe evers n Danz g oge her w h he Ph pp s c facu y
of W enberg

VIII The Sacrament Is A Means Of Grace

W h he e "The Sacramen Is A Means Of Grace " we come o a sub ec ha s much more ex ens ve han hose wh ch have been dea w h n prev ous chap ers If he var ous ques ons ha are connec ed w h he Rea Presence
can be so ved--and have o be so ved--w hou recurrence o us f ca on by fa h ho ds rue ha he Sacramen as a means of grace can be ouched upon on y as a par of he cen ra doc r ne of sa va on We hus s and before a ask
wh ch s of far grea er ser ousness han any of he o her prob ems of sacramen a heo ogy The erm "means of grace" se f s as such oo unc ear o be used w hou an exhaus ve descr p on In he wor d of re g on here s much
grace and here are many means of grace wh ch ack b b ca founda on The a mos au oma c reference o he use of he Word and he Sacramen s of en used n modern pas ora work some mes nvo ves a r sk peop e do no know
n wha way hey shou d be used Fa h n he Rea Presence a one s of no ava a h s po n Hea hen sm s a so fam ar w h he oy of he grea cu c fes va around a de y ha revea s se f The modern specu a ons abou urgy
and sacramen wh ch have nsp red he modern urg ca renewa and n excess have changed he Chr s an houses of worsh p and he rad ona serv ce are ma n y based on observa ons n he f e d of he psycho ogy of re g on
wh ch ho d equa y rue for hea hen r es Mee ng God and he co ec ve fee ng expressed n he fe owsh p of a mea w h r ua forms do no he p n any deeper sense no even f Chr s s sa d o be he cen er

Thus s no enough o ake o hear he need of ex erna ac on and symbo s Sacramen a re g on w a rac a oge her oo many peop e In h s connec on s symp oma c ha he ead ng woman m n s er n Sweden s
who ehear ed y nvo ved n such a k nd of h ghchurchmansh p W h fem n ne ac and n u on she has known how o ake up usefu e ra s ha are cons u ng fac ors n he Ca ho c ype of re g on wh ch has a ways s ghed w h
Goe he The Pro es an s have oo few Sacramen s Over a heo ogy wh ch den es essen a par s of he Chr s an reve a on and proc a ms a Fa her-Mo her-God he red sanc uary amp spreads s warm gh and commun on
a endance s h gh and sa sfac ory In he same way he gnos c cu s cou d a he me when Chr s an y appeared on he scene n he Med erranean wor d mpress he masses w h he r numerous means of grace sp end d serv ces
and beau fu y appare ed pr es esses Here one m gh a so ca o m nd ha much of he sacramen a rev va w h he Pro es an na ona churches of Europe goes back o he Marburg heo og an Fr edr ch He er who w h grea ove
and d gence rev ved many of he rad ona beau fu forms of Lu heran sm n order o pu hem n o he serv ce of a syncre s c heo ogy wh ch no on y hovered above he confess ons bu a so above he re g ons of he wor d For
h m he means of grace were cons u ve e emen s bu he found ha he Jordan of he B b e and he Ganges of he H ndus f owed from he same source

The each ng of he Evange ca Lu heran Church concern ng he means of grace s no o be v ewed as a par of such a concep of he means of grace Tha s preven ed by he each ng of he Reforma on concern ng grace and he
mean ng of grace Wh e here s a cer a n no ceab e re a on be ween he Lu heran each ng of he Rea Presence and med eva heo ogy and h s f nds express on among o her h ngs n Lu her s generous references o he ho y
church under he papacy a h s po n he Lu heran each ng on he means of grace canno by any means be v ewed as an ex ens on of scho as c sm For Lu her was necessary here o make a dec s ve break n con nu y Even f
Lu her c ear y reckoned w h he fac ha he means of grace were a work n he many who were ed o sa va on under he papacy he fee s no h ng bu d s ance from and enm y owards he pervers on of grace wh ch preva ed n he
med eva doc r ne on he means of grace I wou d ndeed be much be er f he use ess fear of Ca ho c sm wh ch goes o such wrong and unhea hy eng hs n s a acks on ransubs an a on were o demons ra e ns ead s Lu heran
con en by emphas z ng he error of Rome as o he means of grace I s revea ng o observe ha gnorance of en re gns as o where he ne of demarca on runs here Even church y Pro es an s accep he genera concep ha he
Reforma on oosened he es be ween he ex erna means of grace and he nward forg veness and ha fa h means ha he s gn f cance of he nd v dua rep aces ha of he pr es and of he means of grace Th s d sf gures he mos
essen a d fference be ween Rome and Lu heran sm n such a way ha he oppos ng par es rade p aces If s a a poss b e o g ve a s mp e summar z ng presen a on of h s ques on may be sa d ha he Reforma on--N B he
Lu heran Reforma on-- nv ed o rea forg veness of s ns n he means of grace peop e who dur ng a he years of he r fe here ofore had used he means of grace n he conv c on ha hey d d no w h cer a n y convey he
forg veness of s ns Tha was he rue na ure of he mons rum ncer ud n s of med eva heo ogy he mons er of sp r ua uncer a n y wh ch bade and s b ds oday ha no one may app y o h mse f w h fu cer a n y he prom se of
he Gospe n Word and Sacramen

The Lu heran Reforma on d d no ar se over a con roversy concern ng he Lord s Supper I was ns ead a con roversy abou abso u on and ndu gences ha caused he sp n he Church of Rome When he Lu heran Confess ons
wan ed o summar ze he d fference n fa h ha had ar sen hey sa d "The bu of Leo X has condemned a very necessary doc r ne ha a Chr s ans shou d ho d and be eve name y we ough o rus ha we have been abso ved no
because of our con r on bu because of he word of Chr s wha ever you b nd e c (Ma 16 19) "162 Here n he bu wh ch s n fac he Roman See s condemna on of he Lu heran congrega ons as here ca he abyss s opened
wh ch accord ng o he Lu heran Confess ons separa es fa h and unbe ef Here s proc a med ha he Roman each ng pu s he accen on human ac v y n confess on name y pen ence wh e for he Lu herans a s ress s pu on
fa h n he ns u on of he Sacramen by Chr s s g v ng he power of he keys o he apos es The same bu condemns he Lu heran sen ence ha recep on of he Sacramen s unwor hy f one re es on se f-exam na on as o s ns
on prayers and o her prepara ons whereas hose who rus ha hey rece ve grace here [ n he Sacramen ] do rece ve grace 163

Th s Roman each ng wh ch refers o prepara on mus consequen y a so each ha s nce no one knows h s own d spos on a forg veness of s ns s uncer a n Th s s he each ng wh ch n Lu her s op n on over urns he founda on
of he Chr s an fa h I ex ngu shes he fa h ha a ways app es o se f w h oy and cer a n y he Gospe n he means of grace Wha Rome d d no unders and--and s does no unders and-- s ha " he Gospe ( n a s forms) s
he power of God un o sa va on o everyone ha be eve h o he Jew f rs and a so o he Greek For here n s he r gh eousness of God revea ed from fa h o fa h as s wr en The us sha ve by fa h" (Romans 1 16ff ) In he
comp e ed sacr f ce wh ch he Gospe proc a ms an e erna r gh eousness s once and for a ach eved and when he Gospe draws n gh be n he Sacramen or n any o her means of grace requ res fa h and no h ng bu fa h
Th s draws a en on o he words wh ch he pr es akes n o h s mou h and o he sacr f ce wh ch he has n h s hands and d spenses w h a hough s abou he eff cacy of prepara on dep h of pen ence and a good commun on The
good commun on good confess on wh ch a ways e s he nd v dua sway be ween hope and fear s rep aced by he s eadfas Word and cer a n abso u on he overf ow ng sacr f ce of a onemen 164

The fa h wh ch s requ red for he use of he means of grace s hus rus n he Gospe proc a med n he words of ns u on when hey ca he who e wor d o he r gh eousness wh ch s va d for a Fa h s d rec ed here o he
Word us as he powerfu Word d rec ed o fa h crea es awakens and preserves Th s does no mean ha he body and b ood of Chr s have ess s gn f cance The Gospe s never an emp y dec ara on of he grace of God sa
proc ama on of he rea za on of h s grace n he obed ence suffer ng and dea h of God For h s reason he Gospe exa s he body and b ood of Chr s n he Sacramen as he grea es of a g f s Th s reasure s conveyed and
commun ca ed o us n no o her way han hrough he words "g ven and poured ou for you " Here you have bo h ru hs ha s Chr s s body and b ood and ha hese are yours as your reasure and g f Chr s s body can never be an
unfru fu va n h ng mpo en and use ess Ye however grea he reasure may be n se f mus be comprehended n he Word and offered o us hrough he Word o herw se we cou d never know of or seek 165

If he word hus conveys o fa h he a on ng and sanc fy ng power of he body and b ood of Chr s s none he ess a ques on of power wh ch ver ab y proceeds from he d v ne body of Chr s For he m dd e Ages h s hough was
unfa homab e 166 Abou h s g f wh ch s ex ended by he hand of he pr es and s n erpre ed o fa h by he Word s sa d "Th s food changes h m who ea s n o se f and makes h m ke se f sp r ua v ng and e erna "167
No o be eve h s o be eve ha he body of Chr s s no such a wonderfu h ng s o fa n o he errors of gnos c heresy o become a Marc on e and a Man chaean 168 In he f na ana ys s h s power of he body of Chr s s no
m ed o he sou wh ch n fa h n he Word s ed f ed by wha he mou h rece ves A so he mou h he hroa and he body169 w n me ge o see ha he food rece ved abo shes he fac of corrup on " he sou unders ands we
ha he body mus ve e erna y because akes un o se f an e erna food wh ch does no eave n he grave "170 Such words are no eccen r c es ha occas ona y f nd he r way n o Lu her s wr ngs qu e by acc den They are
abso u e y se f-ev den h ngs f he Sacramen s rea y God s own body and God s own b ood Lu her knows ha h s each ng here s n agreemen w h he each ng of he fa hers of he church abou he Sacramen as he "med c ne of
mmor a y "171 and he does no back away from such powerfu words wh ch serve o encourage fa h and o g ve some h ng d fferen from he sway ng be ween hope and fear wh ch rad on bade dur ng he M dd e Ages Tha s
why he Reforma on means he grea nv a on o use he mea of he sacr f ce of Ca vary d gen y

We mus never regard he Sacramen as a harmfu h ng wh ch we shou d f ee bu as a pure who esome soo h ng med c ne wh ch a ds and qu ckens us n bo h sou and body For where he sou s hea ed he body has
benef ed a so Why hen do we ac as f he Sacramen were a po son wh ch wou d k us f we a e of ?"172

No o be eve hus abou he Sacramen and never he ess o ake n unbe ef and fear wou d be rea po son "To such peop e no h ng can be good or who esome us as when a s ck person w fu y ea s and dr nks wha s forb dden
h m by he phys c an "173

If anyone wou d ca h s mag c he s bes answered w h he words used by he fa hfu Gnes o-Lu heran Erhard Sperber when he was a acked by a Ph pp s because of h s and he Lu heran Church s each ng concern ng he
re qu ae of he Sacramen "For he [ he Ph pp s ] cons dered con ur ng or mag c for wha happens by God s command and by God s word s r gh and va d f one s o ca h s mag c mus be ca ed ho y commanded mag c
(mag a sanc a & ussa)174 Wh e mag c s he mag c wh ch from he me before he dawn ng of he ages a ways comfor ed crea on n s d s ress and wh ch prepares he new crea on I has s source n God who never asked us for
counse who crea ed us w hou our par c pa on and who saved us w hou our par c pa on and who wan s o be be eved n as such a God n he Sacramen of he A ar

162 Tapper 167 (AP IV 397)

163 WA 7 122 21f

164 As o he ques on abou he mean ng of he so-ca ed Reforma on d scovery e wha he cen ra propos on of he Lu heran Reforma on rea y s he reader s d rec ed o Uuras Saarn vaara Lu her D scovers he Gospe S
Lou s 1951 and Erns B zer F des ex aud u E ne Un ersuchung Uber d e En deckung der Gerech gke Go es durch Mar n Lu her 3 erwe er e Au age Neuk rchen 1966

165 WA 30 225 29ff Tapper 449f (LC V 29 30)

166 Cf E Jane Dempsey Doug ass Jus ca on n a e Med eva Preach ng A s udy o John Ge er o Ke sersberg Le den 1966 188

167 WA 23 203 27f (LW 37 100)

168 WA 23 201 31f (LW 37 99)

169 WA 23 259 4f (LW 37 123)

170 WA 23 191 25ff (LW 37 93f )

171 WA 23 233 23ff (LW 37 132)

172 WA 30 230 37ff Tapper 454 (LC V 68)

173 WA 30 231 4ff Tapper 454 (LC V 69)

174 Erhard Sperber Chr s che und no wend ge Veran wor ung Erffurd 1563 fo 74a

29 November 1998

Th s work s a condensed Eng sh vers on of Hard s 1971 doc ora d sser a on Venerab s e Adorab s Euchar s a (Euchar s c Venera on and Adora on) In eres ed readers shou d wa ch for he comp e e Eng sh rans a on wh ch
s p anned n he near fu ure No par of h s documen s o be fur her pub shed or d ssem na ed by any means w hou he express perm ss on of Er ng T Te gen 314 Pear S Manka o MN 56001 (e-ma
74022 2447@Compuserve com )

he reverend doc or om g hard was born n 1935 n S ockho m Sweden He was a cand da e o ph osophy (=B A ) a Uppsa a n 1956 and n 1971 he de ended h s doc ora hes s H s b b ography nc udes near y 400 en r es
bes des h s d sser a on In 1961 oge her w h some r ends n he a h he ormed S Mar n s Evange ca Lu heran Congrega on n S ockho m o wh ch he became pas or A he me o h s dea h h s pas summer (1998) he was
s pas or o h s congrega on

Dr Hard ound a men or n he ou s and ng German heo og an Hermann Sasse The consequence o h s was ha he s ood opposed o a endenc es oward genera pro es an sm and saw no eas n he Lu heran doc r ne o he
sacramen s w h s rea sm a ru h wh ch was no nego ab e W hou roman c z ng he p aced a h gh va ue on a r ch urg ca orm grow ng ou o he a h n Chr s s rue presence n he D v ne Serv ce

D rec a correspondence concern ng h s essay o he ed ors a SemperRe @ao com

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