# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1855_S357
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Exposition of 1 Corinthians, etc. 357

for from what the Corinthians had to grant the Apostle, it followed that whoever partook of the Holy Supper from time to time was, even at times when he did not happen to be sitting at the table of the Lord, a fellow-partaker of the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Suppose, then, that the Christian in Corinth sat there at the joyous banquet, say in honor of Aphrodite; certainly, at that moment he was not confessing himself to the Christian congregation through partaking of the Holy Supper, but his Christian brothers who saw it had to say: there sits one of ours, who has the body and blood of Jesus Christ in common with us, and God nevertheless still saw in him the one who was a fellow-partaker of his most precious and noblest gift, the body and blood of his only-begotten Son. Must not horror and dismay at all participation in heathen ways have seized him? Perhaps only the last time he had sat worthily at the table of the Lord and received the body and blood of Christ to his blessing, and now, as he ate the idol-sacrifice feast with the heathen, that very thing which had been given him for a blessing became for him a judgment! Truly one ought not to regard it as so small a matter to be a member of the Christian communion and thereby a fellow-partaker of the body and blood of Jesus Christ; the bond among the members of the congregation is, through the commonality of the means of grace — namely, in that they hold the body and blood of Christ in common with one another — so close that one cannot simply come away from it again without more ado, but rather certainly falls, through one's own fault, under God's terrible judgment if one excludes oneself from the Christian congregation; and the gracious gifts are so glorious — in the Holy Supper, indeed the body and blood of Jesus Christ — that to receive them and yet also to take part in idolatry, whether coarse or refined, is just as much as to plunge oneself into everlasting damnation.

If all this, someone might say, is the content of verse 16, then the Apostle really expresses it rather strangely; one would expect him to have spoken somewhat thus: "Do not we, who partake together of bread and wine in the Holy Supper, thereby have communion with one another in the body and blood of Christ?" Instead, he affirms of the bread and wine in the Holy Supper that they are that communion. Paul must indeed have expected that one would wonder at the manner of his speech, for he shows, in a subordinate clause — and indeed one introduced by "for," giving the ground — the reason why he speaks, and can speak, in this way:

Verse 17. "For we being many are one bread, one body, since we are all partakers of that one bread."

The clause grounded by "for" finds its own grounding again in a clause subordinate to it, introduced by "since." This latter brings out the peculiar character of the bread of the Supper: that wherever it is eaten in Christendom, it is everywhere the same; it may be of very different composition, prepared, for example, from different kinds of grain; it may be broken or cut for distribution; it is the bread of the Holy Supper and—