# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juli 1855_S214
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

214 Prof. Dr. Hengstenberg’s Judgment on the State of the Union.

Should a time come—which God in His grace may prevent—then the guilt of the absorptive Union would become evident before all the world. It is the Union that prevents the Church from faithfully using the time of grace granted to it by God, and from bringing its confession to a firm, inviolable position capable of withstanding every assault. The confessional position must necessarily remain doubtful and uncertain as long as, instead of simply grounding oneself upon the confessions, one toils at the Sisyphean task of achieving consensus. It is not the consensus of Prof. Müller and Pastor Ball that resembles the rock in the sea, but the Unaltered Augsburg Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. (?) When the time of temptation comes, it will drive these modern compositions before it like chaff before the wind.

In order to demonstrate the insignificance of the differences between the Reformed and Lutheran Churches, great weight has been placed upon the advance made by Calvin in the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Yet quite apart from the fact that the issue here is far less the significance of the doctrines in themselves than the procedure employed—the recklessness in altering the Church’s body of doctrine and the disregard of all sound and solid principles of church law—this advance does indeed have a certain significance, but by no means the sweeping significance attributed to it. One should already be given pause by the fact that Calvin’s doctrine found far more acceptance in the confessional writings of the Reformed Church than in its actual life. In Reformed countries, such as Scotland and Holland, Zwinglianism continues to prevail almost universally and with only the rarest exceptions, even among those who are otherwise deeply imbued with the spirit of their Church. This fact is explained when we penetrate to the very source of the doctrine. Dr. Müller himself is compelled to say: “The consensus that Calvin concluded with the Zurich theologians in 1549 concerning the doctrine of the sacraments does not deny the essential substance of his doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, but in its formulation it brings that doctrine as close as possible to a doctrine of the sacraments that Calvin himself had described as profane seven years earlier.” Baum’s Life of Beza provides evidence that Calvin and Beza did not possess in the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper the unshakable firmness that otherwise distinguished them; rather, in this matter they adapted themselves to circumstances, at times making concessions to Bullinger and his followers, and at other times to the Lutherans. Why was this so? At Marburg, Luther said to Zwingli and Oecolampad: “You have a different spirit from us.” He recognized that the difference in the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper was only an imperfect human formulation of a difference rooted in the depths of immediacy. In its essential features, this difference persisted even after Calvin’s appearance. His doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, adopted from the mediator Bucer, arose more from a rational effort at mediation than from a new spirit that had come upon him. For that reason it possessed no power of resistance and therefore no generative power; it remained on paper and did not penetrate hearts.*) We believe it all the more necessary to note this here, since

*) The artificiality of Calvin’s doctrine also follows from the origin just described. How long did it take before modern scholarship could attain complete clarity about what Calvin actually intended!