# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1855_S375
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Lutheran Formula of Distribution, etc. 375

we believe it, and even if the whole world no longer wanted to believe
you, that you are truly now giving us what you have promised us!?
How so? Was it then likewise a falsification of the Word of God when
Peter, burning with desire to confess the Lord out of the whole fullness
of his heart, cried out: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God!?"
Indeed, not even hell itself could attack the fidelity to God's Word and
the resolute confession of the truth in a more cunning and more shameless
way than by declaring it, as Mr. Stohlmann does here, to be an
interpolation into God's Word and a mastering of the Holy Spirit! We
must confess that we did not expect this of a man who wishes to be a
Lutheran and to believe in the presence of Christ in the Supper — that
he would not only refrain from using the expression "This is the true
body" at its distribution (for no one compels him to do so), but would
even brand it as a falsification of Scripture and set it beside the abomination
of rationalist devastation in a holy place. It seems God permits such
things only so that a spirit may become manifest which now wants to
make itself at home in the midst of the orthodox Church — a spirit
which, under the pretense of wanting to bring the Church's faith back
into force, intends to destroy it root and branch.

No, one says, it is not the truth contained in the words that we
attack; for this truth we ourselves take the field; it is solely the
unfittingness of these words at such holy moments of devotion that we
censure. — Well then, let us also seek the answer to the question, which
formula in the distribution of the Holy Supper may be regarded as
admissible and fitting, and which may not.

The answer to this lies at hand. Our orthodox and sincere fathers
have already given it, according to what has been cited above, and its
correctness is so evident that it needs no further grounding. Every such
formula, namely, is without doubt admissible and fitting which expresses
the right faith of the communicants, in simple words, either concerning
the essence, or the fruit, or both at once. What Christ did and said at
the institution of the holy Sacrament has already been recited at the
Consecration in the narrower sense. Now when the guests come to sit
down at the table of heaven spread for them on earth by their heavenly
bridegroom, and to let themselves be fed and given drink with his divine
body and divine blood, then it is time that they too, doing this in
remembrance of him, open their mouths to praise the unspeakable gift,
to laud and to extol him who is at once their host and their food, to
proclaim his death before all the world, and thus, confessing it aloud, to
distinguish his body and his blood.

If we now measure by this standard all the customary formulas of
distribution, we must declare all those to be admissible and fitting in
which the faith is expressed that the communicants at the table of their