# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1846 06 13_S81
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's teaching shall pass away neither now nor evermore."

Edited by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 2.

St. Louis, Mo., June 13, 1846.

No. 21.

Terms: Der Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, at a subscription price of one dollar for out-of-town subscribers, who must pay half of this in advance and bear the cost of postage. — In St. Louis single copies are sold for 5 cents each.

(Submitted by Pastor Th. Brohm.)

Can a Lutheran Christian, with a good conscience, take part in such administrations of the sacraments as are performed according to the prescription of the newest "Church Agenda for the Evangelical Lutheran Congregations in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, etc." of 1842?
(Continued.)

If, in answer to the question raised in No. 16 of this paper, I now also let follow a brief examination of the Communion formularies prescribed by the agenda in question, I ask that this not be taken as a hasty presumption or as a conceited fault-finding. In a public church matter that concerns not insignificant secondary things but the reverend sacraments of our Lord Christ — the dearest treasure that the Lord has entrusted to his Church — everyone is, I believe, entitled to speak and to take to heart the affliction of Joseph. Had another undertaken to speak, I would gladly have kept silent. This agenda has, to be sure, already been mentioned disapprovingly a few times in this paper, but there has so far been lacking a deeper examination of its contents, from which the reader might gain an exact insight into its true nature; a closer, if only brief, examination is therefore, in my judgment, not superfluous. That this is no vain quarreling over words, no straining at gnats, but that a treasure is at stake greater than the whole world, will emerge sufficiently from the examination itself.

Rightly has the orthodox Church always treated the holy sacraments with the deepest reverence and holiest earnestness, and has most decisively condemned all presumptuousness, love of innovation, and ambiguity in this regard. And how should she act otherwise? For the holy sacraments are the holiest of holy things, into which even the angels long to look, and they are the only means, next to the holy Gospel, by which the great God deals with us sinners and imparts his grace. Should it not be the holiest duty of every Christian to watch and to strive that these means of grace not be diminished for him, or even torn from him? If we lose them, then the way to the kingdom of grace of Christ himself is closed to us. The Lutheran Church has good reason to praise the mercy of God, that alongside the pure Word he has also entrusted to her the right, wholesome use of the sacraments; all the heavier, therefore, is the responsibility of her children if they thanklessly disparage this entrusted good, if they even falsify it. Not without the deepest sorrow can one see what the aforementioned agenda has undertaken with the holy sacraments. What falsifications it has undertaken with holy Baptism we have already seen; not less serious are those it has permitted itself with the Holy Supper. We will now set aside everything else, however much more might still be said, and dwell only on what belongs to the very essence of the Holy Supper. — Here we encounter first of all the questionable distribution formula, highly suspect both in its origin and in its tendency, using the words: "Christ says: take, eat, etc." However trivial and innocent these words may seem to an untrained person, they must be offensive to one who knows that they were introduced into the Communion service as a convenient vehicle of the false union, and have become a shibboleth of those who consider it a matter of indifference whether one believes in the true, essential presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper or not. It has already been rightly shown earlier in this paper how that formula is, at best, inappropriate, and, on account of its tendency, highly suspect. Since that formula — "Christ says: take, eat, etc." — leaves it uncertain how a communicant is to interpret the words of Christ's institution, one must search all the more precisely, in the addresses and prayers used at the Supper, what confession the agenda has laid down in them. If the agenda gave elsewhere a clear, unmistakable confession of the pure Lutheran doctrine of the Supper, then that formula might still be censured and rejected as inexpedient, yet it would then have to be judged far more mildly than is possible under the circumstances that actually prevail. But if we look in vain throughout the whole agenda for a clear, unambiguous confession of the pure doctrine of the Lord's Supper, and find instead confessions that are partly ambiguous and partly plainly contrary to the Lutheran Church, then our judgment of those words — "Christ says, etc." — must necessarily rise to an unconditional rejection. There are to be found in the agenda three different formularies. The first indeed seems to state itself in accordance with the Lutheran confession of the Holy Supper, for it says there: "He gives us, under the blessed bread, his body, which was crucified for us, and under the blessed cup his blood, which was shed for the sins of the world." If the agenda let the matter rest at this explanation, we would believe without suspicion that it sincerely confesses the true presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper. But what are we to think when we read in the second formulary how that confession is plainly contradicted? For there it says: "Since we are creatures of sense, he has appointed two outward elements, perceptible to the senses, namely bread and wine, as it were as pledges, in order to assure us thereby that with, in, and under the same we are to become partakers of his body and blood, that is, of his whole grace of reconciliation. As surely, then, as the penitent communicant receives the blessed bread and the blessed cup, so surely will he also, in a manner invisible to us, receive from his Savior a share in his body and blood." Here the agenda speaks so plainly that it cannot be misunderstood. By the body and blood of Christ it understands not his true body and blood, but only "his whole grace of reconciliation"; by the eating and drinking of his body and blood, nothing else than a becoming partaker of his grace of reconciliation — that is to say, nothing other than what is elsewhere called spiritual enjoyment; from which it also follows that only the penitent communicant receives the body and blood of Christ, that is, his whole grace of reconciliation, while the impenitent receives nothing but bread and wine. With this the agenda has formally abandoned the pure Lutheran doctrine of the essential presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Supper, and has formally gone over to the side of the Reformed Church. The third formulary, as well as the one used for communion of the sick, moves