# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1855_S374
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

374 The Lutheran Formula of Distribution, etc.

(the Electoral Saxon [Agenda] of 1580) prescribes this formula: '''Take
and drink, this is the blood of Jesus Christ, which is shed for your sin''
etc.,' this is not commanded absolutely, but is prescribed to the
unlearned for the sake of accommodation, and to the learned by way
of example, and the dispensans minister (the church servant who
distributes) will not sin if some other word in the formula should
occasionally occur to him, or even if, not knowing the church's proper
formula, he has accustomed himself to a good formula of his own, which
is just as good as the one given by way of example in the church order."
(See Wilisch's Kirchenhistorie der Stadt Freiberg, Leipzig 1737, pp.
316, 317.)

From this it is accordingly clear that the words spoken by the one
administering at the distribution of the consecrated elements are not the
Word of God that constitutes the Sacrament, as Mr. Stohlmann dreams,
but the confession of the communing Church in response to this Word
of God; they are not a "Scripture citation," which as is well known even
the devils do not shrink from uttering, but rather the Yes and Amen of
the believing guests at Christ's table of grace to a truth taken from
Scripture; they are not "the declaration of the Holy Spirit," but the
declaration of the congregation of saints and of its minister. They are
not something that belongs to what was prescribed by Christ for the
administration of his most holy Sacrament — for Christ did not repeat
some fixed formula to each individual disciple present at the institution
— but rather a word freely chosen by the Church, by which it testifies
to its faith in Christ's word and at the same time seeks to come to the
aid of its own faith. The Church has therefore never let itself be
deprived of the freedom, after the words of God had been repeated
without addition and without abridgment for the blessing of the earthly
elements, then to answer in faith as the spirit of faith moved it to do.
If, then, the Lutheran Church at countless altars, for three hundred
years now, upon hearing the great words of Christ, breaks out, in the
holy moment when the highest good on earth is now wondrously
bestowed upon it, into the words: "This is the true body, this is the true
blood of Christ!" then only an ignorance allied to the most boundless
lack of understanding, or the most frightful malice, can for that reason
slander it and say that it thereby "inserts something into the Word of
God" and wishes to "master, outbid, and improve upon the declaration
of the Holy Spirit." Or how so? Should it be a deceitful interpolation
into God's Word, a mastering of the Holy Spirit, if the Church, as soon
as it has heard from God's own mouth that its God and Lord will give it
an inexpressibly great heavenly good already here on earth, firmly lays
hold of the word of promise and cries out to its God and Lord in
response: Lord, we believe what you say; we believe that you do not
deceive us;