# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Februar 1856_S39
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Consubstantiation and Impanation. 39

comprehensible, bodily manner, as he walked bodily on earth, when he took up space and gave up space according to his size. Such a manner he can still use, if he will, as he did after the resurrection and will do on the Last Day. In such a manner he is not in God, or with the Father, nor in heaven, as the mad spirit dreams — for God is not a bodily space or place. And to this the sayings which the spiritualizers cite refer" (in refutation of the possibility of a presence in the Supper), "namely, that Christ leaves the world and goes to the Father. — Secondly, the incomprehensible, spiritual manner, in which he takes up no space, nor gives up space, but passes through every creature wherever he wills; as my sight (to give a crude comparison) passes through air, light, or water and is present there, and takes up no space, nor gives it up; as sound or tone passes through air or water or board and wall and is present there, and likewise takes up no space nor gives it up; likewise, as light and heat *) pass through air, water, glass, crystal, and the like, and are present there, and likewise neither take up nor give up space, and much more of the kind. In such a manner he made use, when he came forth from the sealed tomb and came through the closed door**), and is present in the bread and wine in the Supper, and, as is believed, when he was born of his mother. — Thirdly, the divine, heavenly manner, in which he is one Person with God, according to which indeed all creatures must be far more thoroughly permeated by him and present to him than they are according to the other manner." (Ibid., fol. 302.)

After these definite, sun-clear explanations it seems impossible that the Reformed should still, over and over, have been laying the charge of impanation and consubstantiation upon the Lutherans. But behold! when they realized that their fight against the true biblical Lutheran conception of the sacramental union could not possibly bring them even the semblance of a victory, they clung to their old fiction and went on contesting it, again and again, as Lutheran superstition, as bravely as triumphantly — like the Baron von Münchhausen of old. The later dogmaticians, too, have therefore found themselves compelled to reject those notions ever anew as unbiblical and unlutheran. Thus Johann Gerhard writes, in his continuation of the Harmony of the Evangelists: "When we confess that we believe in a true, real (realem), and substantial presence of the body and blood of Christ, we do not thereby take

*) It is therefore not correct, as we heard said above, that the Lutherans compare the union of the body of Christ with the bread to "red-hot iron." This rests on a confusion of the sacramental union with the personal union — a comparison which, admittedly, the Lutherans, along with the ancient church, do draw with regard to the latter. In the "crude" comparison given above concerning heat, only the non-spatiality of a thing's being in a given ubi is meant to be the tertium comparationis.

**) Not through the keyhole, as some say; nor indeed through the window, as Peter Martyr unworthily suggests; nor through an opening that opened itself to Christ, or through walls that opened themselves to him, as Beza and others hold!