# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S36
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

36 Consubstantiation and Impanation.

the bread and the body of the Lord, between his blood and the wine, and further, that he taught that the strengthening of faith which is ascribed to the sacraments rests not on a power inherent in the external things themselves, but on one that is Christ's own and is distributed through his Spirit by means of the words and the holy signs. When I recognized this, I was at great pains to show and commend this to others as well. I therefore wish also in this place to bear witness before all who read this, that Martin Luther, and those who truly hold with him and duly follow his teaching, accept in the Holy Supper no impanation, nor any spatial enclosure of the body of Christ in the bread and of the blood in the wine, nor do they ascribe to the outward acts of the sacraments as such any saving power in themselves. Rather they hold a true, substantial presence and distribution of the body and blood of the Lord together with the bread and wine in the Holy Supper — which indeed both the Lord's own words and the testimony of the Apostle plainly express — which presence and distribution rests upon the word and institution of the Lord, without any natural union of the body and blood of Christ with the elements. Ulrich Zwingli too had, when M. Luther and others maintained that the bread is the body of the Lord, or that the body of the Lord is in the bread, persuaded himself that they meant that the body of the Lord was either "made one substance with the bread" (consubstantiation), "or spatially enclosed in the bread" (impanation); from which he then began to interpret the word "is" in the Lord's words, "This is my body," as meaning "signifies," and was, in the heat of the controversy, brought to the point where, wishing to combat solely the impanation and spatial enclosure and a worldly kind of presence of Christ, he (at last) said that the Lord was, in the Holy Supper, rather not present than present. The same thing happened also to Oecolampadius. He too supposed that Luther's words asserted the impanation or spatial enclosure of the body of Christ... But Luther never approved of any of this, although not a few have held that it was contained in the words which he was accustomed to use and to rely upon in treating this article — namely, that he denied every trope in these words, "This is my body," etc. (See: Concordia, instituta Witebergae, A. 1536. Addita est declaratio art. de praesent. corp. et sang. Dom. Autore M. Bucero. — Urcellis. C. 3–6.)

With this retraction of Bucer's, however, this controversy was still not settled. Even two years before his death Luther found himself compelled to take up this matter once more. He writes, namely, in his last confession: "Zwingel (at Marburg) carried on with me a long, nonsensical chatter de locali inclusione — that the body of Christ could not be in the bread as in a space or a vessel — just as though we taught that Christ's body were in the bread as