# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1856_S21
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

21

Excerpts as Contributions to Pastoral Casuistry.

May a Pastor, Under Certain Circumstances, Administer the Holy
Supper to Himself?

It would seem to be of importance for many a pastor to know just here
what our Church has answered, again and again, to this question, and how she
has grounded her decision on this point, since many pastors here stand so
solitary and so far removed from fellow ministers that, if they are unwilling to
administer the sacrament to themselves, they must often go without it for a
year or more at a time.

As for our dear father Luther first of all, he indeed writes in his
tract, "How to Conduct a Christian Mass and Go to the Table
of God," from the year 1523: "Thereafter let him administer the sacrament both
to himself and to the people, while the Agnus Dei is being sung." (Opp. X,
2760.) This might seem, on the other hand, to contradict what the same Luther
writes in the Smalcald Articles: "And if one should pretend, for a fair show,
that he wished, out of devotion, to shrive or commune himself: that is not in
earnest; for if he seriously wishes to commune, he has it certainly and best of
all in the sacrament, administered according to the institution of Christ. But
to commune oneself is a human conceit, uncertain and unnecessary, and
moreover forbidden. And he does not even know what he is doing, because
without God's Word he follows a false human conceit and invention. So it is
also not right (even if all else were well) that one should use the common
sacrament of the Church according to his own private devotion, and thereby,
for his own pleasure, without God's Word, carry it on outside the fellowship of
the Church." (II, 2.) These latter words seem, however, only to contradict the
former on the surface. There it is a matter of the pastor's self-communion
together with the congregation; here, of an alleged self-communion with the
exclusion of the congregation, in the so-called silent or sacrificial Mass.
This Luther rightly rejects, partly because it is only put forward as a pretense
where one is ashamed to confess that one wishes to sacrifice Christ, and partly
because the holy Communion is a sacrament that has been given to the Church
as a fellowship of saints and therefore presupposes several participants. Neither
of these grounds and objections applies to that other self-communion; it is
therefore by no means, as some have imagined, declared here by Luther, and
thus in our Symbols, to be impermissible in itself.

The later Lutheran theologians, though they are indeed far from
declaring the pastor's self-communion to be the normal manner of
dispensation, do nevertheless, in the case of necessity described above, declare
it to be unquestionably permissible.

Thus Johann Gerhard writes in his Loci theologici: "Here it is
asked: may a minister of the church administer the holy Supper to himself?
Dr. Pelargus denies this in his 'School of Faith,' on the 10th Article of the
Augsburg Confession, in that he avails himself of these grounds: