# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1855_S366
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

366 Exposition of 1 Corinthians etc.

the inward man of faith be strengthened. Against this doctrine Paul's words show that eating and drinking bread and wine in the Supper, and eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ, are not two separate acts — as would be the case with these two: partaking of bread and wine with the mouth, and partaking of the body and blood of Christ with faith — but rather that the very same eating and drinking that takes bread and wine also takes the body and blood of Christ, even if in a sacramental manner; for the common eating and drinking of the bread and wine in the Holy Supper effects a fellowship of the guests at the Supper, which fellowship is the fellowship of the body and blood of Christ; and if you wished, then, to declare the eating and drinking of the body and blood of Christ to be figurative, as you must if it is to occur only through faith and not through the mouth, you would have to declare the eating and drinking of the bread and wine figurative as well — which of course does not occur to you. Furthermore, the Apostle has, precisely in our passage, emphasized that the individual guest at the Supper is a member and fellow-partaker of the fellowship of the body and blood of Christ, in order to hold up before those communicants who took part in the sacrificial meals of idols that they too were fellow-partakers and joint possessors of the body and blood of Christ — they who, by their participation in those abominable meals, were denying their very faith (1 Corinthians 11:17ff). It is thereby clearly stated that unbelievers, just as much as believers, receive the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Supper, and that therefore it is not faith that first brings the body and blood of Christ to the bread and wine, nor is the reception through faith the actual eating and drinking in the sacrament. Rather, it is the word of God that brings the body and blood of Christ to the bread and wine in the Holy Supper; the believer eats and drinks to his blessing, the unbeliever to his judgment. In general, neither our passage nor any passage anywhere says that the Holy Supper is first made complete through the faith of the recipient; the other means of grace, too — the word of God and Holy Baptism — are in no way completed by the faith of the hearers or of those baptized; who gives us the right to arrange the table of the Lord according to our own notions? If, finally, in order that we Christians should on no account receive the body and blood of Christ, one wishes to put in their place mere powers thereof and thereby, so to speak, fob us off, then all Christians ought to protest against this with one accord; I will be content with God's gifts, content even with this, for instance, that he has not further revealed to me the manner of eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Supper — but of these goods of the house of God I will let not one be curtailed or taken from me.

What an inexpressible gift of grace we receive at the table of the Lord! That is truly a memorial of his wonders, which he has instituted among us with the gift of his body and blood. More deeply and more movingly he could not impress upon our heart and mind the remembrance of him, nor more firmly and unshakably could he assure us of the forgiveness of all our sins