# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S35
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Consubstantiation and Impanation. 35

Now, as unbiblical, carnal, unworthy, and self-contradictory as these notions of the presence of Christ — namely of his body and blood — in the Holy Supper are, so unlutheran and contrary to the confessions of our church are they also. Luther writes in his treatise "That These Words of Christ, 'This is My Body,' Still Stand Firm," of the year 1527: "How the body is in the bread, we do not know, nor should we need to know it. We are to believe God's Word, and not prescribe to it a manner or a measure. We see bread with our eyes, but we hear with our ears that the body is there." (Opp. XX, 968.) In this confession of ignorance on this point the whole orthodox Lutheran church has indeed followed Luther. She has at all times, so that the Word of the eternal Son of God might remain true, contended for this: that the body and blood of Jesus Christ are there — the "that"; but the "how," the manner of the presence, she has never pretended to be able to explain. And she has therefore not only called the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the sacrament a supernatural, mystical presence, unknown to reason, incomprehensible, unfathomable, wholly unusual one (inusitata, for which there is no complete analogy, no second species of the same kind), but has also expressly rejected and condemned all those crass, gross, carnal, Capernaitic notions (John 6:59–64) of an earthly, physical, spatial — that is, space-describing, space-giving or space-taking — presence. All the modes of speech which our church employs on this matter have no other purpose than to confess and assert the reality and truthfulness of the presence of the heavenly goods of the sacrament, and at the same time precisely to exclude those unworthy notions of it devised by reason. Whether she calls the praesentia now a substantialis or realis, or, as is done by some theologians, also a corporalis and the like, she does not thereby mean to determine the modus praesentiae, but intends to hold fast to nothing more than that the praesentia is a vera — that is, that the body of Christ is truly there.

The first to attribute to Luther the notion of an impanation and consubstantiation was Carlstadt, who therefore blasphemously called the God of the Lutherans a "God made of bread." See Luther's preface to the Swabian Syngramma. (Opp. XX, 723.) In this Zwingli, Oecolampadius, and even Bucer of Strasbourg followed him. The latter, however, after having read Luther's "Great Confession Concerning the Holy Supper" and having conferred with Luther in person, retracted his accusation. Thus he writes, namely, in his Enarrationes on Matthew 26: "When Luther, in the course of this disputation, set forth the whole matter of the sacrament at greater length, I saw that he did not let the body and blood of the Lord be united with bread and wine after the manner of a natural bond, nor did he enclose it spatially in bread and wine, nor did he ascribe to the sacraments that peculiar power by virtue of which they of themselves bring the blessedness of the communicants, but that he held only a sacramental union between