# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1856_S119
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

"In, With, and Under." 119

ascended and, while he is present in the holy Supper, is not thereby outside of heaven and does not depart from the right hand of God? Let them set against us, as long as they wish, the Scripture passages that ascribe to Christ a seat in heaven; let them hold Christ enclosed in heaven and wickedly exclude him from the sacrament of the Eucharist: we, on the contrary, set against them the passages which testify that Christ so sits in heaven at the right hand of God that, according to his promise, he is with his Church until the end of the world, and presently dispenses his body with the bread and his blood with the wine in the holy communion of the Supper." (L. c. p. 297–305.)

To this, and to other objections of Westphal's, Calvin answered anything but calmly and in a Christian manner. Calvin writes rather, among other things, as follows in April 1550: "The apes of Luther (for he has left few followers), priding themselves on the name of Wittenberg, stir up monstrous disturbances everywhere whenever not all their words are accepted at once. When the consensus of our church with that of Zurich appeared, I feared nothing less than that Westphal would take from it material for combat. I was then compelled to enter the fray, in order to tame the wildness of the beast." (See Calvin's letters, edited by Beza, Lausanne, 1576, page 478.) Indeed, Calvin continues in the very same letter as follows: "You ask my advice, whether it is permitted you to receive the holy Supper of Christ from the hands of those who are held by us to be heretics, because we deny that Christ's flesh is chewed with the teeth; although I now see that it is a matter of bad example when someone abstains from the holy Supper, it would nevertheless be a perverse and therefore faithless hypocrisy to give even tacit approval, by accepting the symbol of concord, to that false and tasteless fiction, unless a clear and honest confession of the sound (?) doctrine precedes it." Let Calvin, we say, and other Reformed teachers as well, go on bringing forward again, even after Westphal's and other Lutherans' so earnest protestations, the old accusations that we believe in an impanation and consubstantiation, indeed in a tearing of the body of Christ with the teeth (!) — these are nevertheless nothing more than malicious calumnies which others, without knowing what they do, have copied down again after them. We therefore call upon the editor of the "Ref. Church Gazette" either to name to us just a single recognized Lutheran teacher who has taught those errors, or to concede to us without qualification that our Church has not only never declared those false doctrines to be articles of church faith in its public confessions, but that they have likewise never been set forth as truths in the private writings of our recognized teachers of the Church.