# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S37
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Consubstantiation and Impanation. 37

straw in a sack, or wine in a barrel. Accordingly some of them excused themselves, saying they had not understood it otherwise — that we and the papists taught alike, that Christ's body was in the sacrament localiter, as straw is in a sack. Oh, that was a lame, cold, feeble excuse; for they knew very well that neither the papists nor we had so taught. And even if (incredible as it is to say) they really had not understood it otherwise, they would thereby have to confess that, like madmen, they were attacking things which they themselves had never heard or understood. Rather, the papists teach thus — no, not the papists, but the holy Christian church, and we with them (for the pope, as has been said, did not institute the sacrament) — that Christ's body is not there localiter (as straw is in a sack), but definitive (that is, it is certainly there, not as straw in a sack, but nevertheless bodily and truly) there." (See Short Confession Concerning the Holy Sacrament. Anno 1544. XX, 2208, 9.) Luther could indeed not have expressed more clearly how he wished the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Supper to be understood, than when he says here: the body and blood of Christ are not localiter, but definitive, in the blessed elements; that is, he wishes only the ubi, the where — that is, the reality of the presence — to be maintained, to the exclusion of every spatial mode of existence; just as, for example, the spirit of man, an angel, a glorified body, heaven, hell, have their ubi, or are definitive somewhere, without spatial extension belonging to them — to which, rather, although they are indeed somewhere, illocalitas nonetheless belongs. By no means, then, does Luther, in saying that the body of Christ is definitive there, mean to define the particular manner of the sacramental presence and to explain it as a definitive presence in the sense in which it belongs to the angels; the tertium comparationis here is solely the non-spatiality, the manner of being somewhere, as it obtains in that heavenly world. Rightly, therefore, does Carpzov write in his Isagoge into the symbolical books: "We note that this presence is, 1, not a bounded one, that is, physical, namely spatial, nor angelic, namely definitive, but an unbounded and divine one, which belongs to the body and blood of Christ by virtue of the union of the natures, whereby that very power of being present wherever it wills, which is proper to the divine nature, has been communicated to the human nature in Christ." (p. 345.)

After Luther's death it was Calvin who revived the old accusation, as may be seen from the "Apologia confessionis de coena Domini contra corruptelas Calvini" by Joachim Westphal in Hamburg (Ursellis 1558, see p. 297 ff.). Our church has therefore also expressed herself clearly and distinctly on this in the Formula Concordiae of 1580. Thus it says here, among other things (in a citation from the Wittenberg Concordienformel, as it was drawn up jointly in the year 1536 by Luther and Bucer and other Saxon and Upper-German theologians and sub-