# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S34
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

34 Consubstantiation and Impanation.

of a consubstantiation and impanation in the Holy Supper, yet with the greatest boldness, despite all protests against it from the confessionally faithful Lutherans here, it charges those same people, and indeed the whole old Lutheran church that has remained with Luther's teaching, again and again and again with that unbiblical notion of the presence of the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the sacrament of the altar. This is so notorious that we are spared the trouble of citing evidence for it, for example from the "Lutheran Observer," from the "Evangelical Lutheran," and elsewhere.

To be sure, in recent times warning has often been given against reawakening the old controversy over the Holy Supper; and yet it is precisely those who issue this warning who attack, again and again, the teaching of the Lutheran church on this point, declaring it to be not only a remnant of the papacy and a product of dark, superstitious times, but also putting upon it an utterly false interpretation and then making renunciation of it a shibboleth of genuine American Lutherans. Who, then, are the ones reawakening the old controversy? Those who remain with the old teaching of our church as it is laid down in her confessions and who defend it against attacks and distortions? Or is it not rather those who, in the very midst of our church, fight and misconstrue this teaching as unbiblical and popish? Every fair-minded person, even among our adversaries, will have to grant us that it is the latter. —

For this time, let us be permitted only to reject the teaching of a consubstantiation and impanation imputed to the confessionally faithful Lutherans.

What, first of all, do these terms mean? — Consubstantiation, according to its literal sense, means such a joining of two substances that they, mingling together, melt into one single substance or mass consisting only of different ingredients — as through the pouring together of the substances water and wine, mead-water arises, and of honey and water, mead, and through the intermingling of meat and flour, meat-cakes (artokreas) are prepared. Consubstantiation in the Holy Supper would accordingly involve the concept of a spatial joining, mingling, and melting-together of the body and blood of Christ with the blessed elements into one new mass of a twofold kind — just as Eutyches once asserted the melting-together of the two natures in Christ into one. Impanation, on the other hand, means the spatial being-within, being-hidden, lying-concealed, being-enclosed of a thing within a loaf of bread, as within a capsule that contains and encloses the thing. In the Holy Supper, then, impanation would express the notion that the body of Christ, contracting itself into a quite tiny body, lay hidden beneath the blessed bread and was enclosed by it as by its own container.*)

*) In any case Heinrich Suso (d. 1365) taught impanation. Cf. Unschuldige Nachrichten, vol. 1748, pp. 812, 813.