Lutheran Quotations

If our church right at this point has always taken this most seriously and has not admitted to the Lutheran celebration of the Lord’s Supper those who reject the Lutheran doctrine of the Sacrament, it has not thereby anticipated the last judgment. In the ancient church the communicant, to whom the consecrated elements were given with the words “The body of Christ” and “The blood of Christ,” answered with his “Amen.” How can one who is Reformed say Amen to the Lutheran distribution formula? He must take offense at it. Who gives us the right to mislead someone into an unworthy reception of the Lord’s Supper in that he does not discern the body of the Lord (1 Cor. 11:29), and to whom would we want to be accountable for it? Is that Christian love?

Something else also belongs in our instruction of the congregation about the Sacrament of the Altar according to Article XXIV of the Augsburg Confession: “The people are also given instruction about other false teaching concerning the sacrament.” That is not to be avoided. The condemnations cannot be separated from the positive explanation of the doctrine.

What totally new substance our confirmation instruction would receive if it again became sacramental instruction and the Fourth and Sixth Chief Parts did not just make up a more or less unrelated appendage. And don’t let anyone come up with the excuse that the children are not yet mature enough or that they would misunderstand it. Where that sort of thing is said, it may be assumed that the teacher is not yet mature enough. How one can say these things to children one can learn, with the necessary changes, from the Catholic instruction for First Communion. That is what we can do. The rest God must do: awaken the hunger and thirst for the Sacrament, which is always at the same time a hunger and thirst for the Word of God.

Here we can learn from the liturgical movement of our time. On this point they are clearly right. Our people should know the meaning of the Gloria, the Preface, the Sanctus, the Benedictus and Hosanna, the Consecration as it is expounded in the Formula of Concord, the Agnus Dei, and the Communion. We can explain it to them in special lectures, but we can also do it in sermon and Bible class.

Our first task is to celebrate the Sacrament of the Altar again and again quite seriously but also with the blessed joy of the first Christians (Acts 2:47). Moreover, we Lutherans have the great freedom that exists, as was already mentioned, in the celebration of the Roman Mass. It can take place in utter simplicity but also with the full splendor of the ancient liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, which Luther preserved and the Lutheran Church kept for two centuries with such great love as a priceless treasure.

Against the foolish objection that already before the Communion we receive forgiveness in the absolution Luther has already said what is necessary. We cannot receive forgiveness often enough and should receive it in all kinds of ways, for we remain sinners until we die, even though in faith we are righteous.

The church of the sola Scriptura can never forget that the Lord’s Supper is also a memorial meal. “This do in remembrance of Me.” Has any of the great men of world history ever established such a memorial for himself as Jesus in His Supper? Has there ever been a testament as faithfully carried out as this one? “For the forgiveness of sins”? Has a church ever more faithfully preserved this than the church of the sola fide? According to Roman doctrine no one may receive Communion who is in a state of mortal sin, for with such a person, as Thomas (S. th. 3. 79. 3) explains, Christ cannot unite. Lutheran doctrine believes that Jesus comes only to such people, for He is the Savior of sinners.

One can say confidently that in the four centuries since Luther just about every conceivable path has been followed to get around the literal sense. At the end of this path of so much toil and trouble, of so much expenditure of powers of discernment and learning, modern exegesis must capitulate before the plain wording. “The text stands there too powerfully.” “The path of the spirit is the detour,” said Hegel [1770–1831]. From the detour of historical, psychological, and philosophical researches, discoveries, mistakes, and wrong tracks of so many centuries,\ theology returns, insofar as it is genuine theology, to the paradoxical doctrine of the presence of the true body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, to the real presence.

All we have are the Words of Institution as they have been transmitted in the New Testament in Greek translation in differing forms but with a consistent meaning. Jesus really meant what He said: that the bread that He gave to His disciples was His body. He really meant what He said: that the wine that He gave them in the cup was His blood. It cannot have been a parable, or He would have given an explanation or introduced it as a parable. In reality, He would have proposed a riddle for them instead of a parable, which no one has solved to this day. Even the appeal to the Pauline figure of speech of the “partaking of the body” and to the cup as a testament does not help us over the fact that Paul, as well as John, knows of an eating of the body (or flesh) and of a drinking of the blood. One also cannot give a new interpretation to “body,” for the Johannine “flesh” shows what is meant. One cannot spiritualize “body” and “flesh.” The “blood” stands there too. One cannot say that “flesh and blood” or “body and blood” together mean “person,” for in the institution body and blood did not even appear in the same sentence. They appear in two sentences that were spoken at the beginning and at the end (“after supper”) of the meal, separated by at least an hour.

The great art of exegesis consists in weighing all the questions of historical research and thinking them through, making use of all the findings of history, and then saying to the historian where the boundary of his knowledge lies. Every historian is in danger of wanting to understand the people with whom he is dealing psychologically, to enter into their situation internally and externally, and from there to interpret their words. It is one of the basic realizations of recent theology that this procedure is not possible with the person of Jesus, and that is because our sources are not sufficient. The theologian will see in the extraordinary reserve of the evangelists, which makes a biography of Jesus and a description of His soul impossible, the indication that we cannot understand the God-man psychologically. None of us can experience what went on in the soul of Jesus in the hour of the Last Supper. Thus all efforts to experience psychologically and to describe what Jesus must have been thinking at that time and how His words must therefore be explained are frustrated. That explains the diversity of the explanations, which Luther already criticized in those who felt they had to go behind the plain literal sense.