# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S38
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

38 Consubstantiation and Impanation.

signed): "(We) do not hold that the body and blood of Christ are enclosed in the bread localiter, that is, spatially, or otherwise permanently united with it apart from the partaking of the sacrament." (Art. 7. Repetition, fol. 294a.) Even the predicate "spiritual," with respect to the presence and the partaking of the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Supper, our fathers in the Formula of Concord do not reject, provided it be rightly understood. Thus they write, namely: "When Dr. Luther or we use this word 'spiritual' in this matter, we understand thereby the spiritual, supernatural, heavenly manner in which Christ is present at the Holy Supper, working not only in the believing comfort and life, but also in the unbelieving judgment — whereby we reject the Capernaitic notions of a gross, carnal presence which is measured out and forced upon our churches by the Sacramentarians *) in defiance of all our repeated public testimony; in which sense we also say that the body and blood of Christ are received, eaten, and drunk spiritually in the Holy Supper, although such partaking takes place with the mouth, while the manner is nevertheless spiritual." (Ibid., fol. 802b.) "As we then," it says accordingly in the "Summary Formulation," "hereby utterly condemn the Capernaitic eating of the body of Christ — as though one tore his flesh with the teeth and digested it like other food, which the Sacramentarians, against the testimony of their own conscience, and despite all our repeated testimony, wantonly force upon us and thereby make our teaching hateful to their hearers — and hold and believe instead, by virtue of the plain words of Christ's testament, a true yet supernatural eating of the body of Christ, as also a drinking of his blood, which human sense and reason cannot comprehend, but which takes our understanding captive to the obedience of Christ, as in all the other articles of faith, and which mystery is grasped in no other way than by faith alone and is revealed in the Word." (Ibid., fol. 243, 244.) Finally it further says in the "Repetition": "Christ's one body has three manners, or all three manners, of being present there. First, the comprehensible

*) It is as strange as it is significant that Herr Dr. Kurtz and his fellow adherents themselves openly admit that among them one must reckon with people rather like the so-called "Sacramentarians" of former times. Thus the aforenamed writes, namely, in his little tract "Why are you a Lutheran?" of the year 1843, after having declared that here in America only a few — namely those who have come from Europe — still believe in consubstantiation: "The generally received opinion is, that the bread and wine remain unchanged in the Lord's Supper; that they are merely symbolic representations of the Saviour's body, but there is nevertheless a special spiritual blessing bestowed on all worthy communicants by which their faith and christian graces are strengthened. This is the view which Melanchthon (?) and those Lutheran divines seem to have maintained who were termed Sacramentarians. With the few isolated exceptions mentioned above, this is the common view of the great mass of Lutherans in the United States." p. 223.