# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1856_S133
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Obligation to the Ecclesiastical Confessions, etc. 133

not only omnipotence and the omnipresence bound up with it, but also
other attributes which, considered by themselves, belong only to the
divine nature, are ascribed to the person of Christ even insofar as he,
according to his human nature, is called, for example, Son of Man (John
5:25; compare also Phil. 2:10). Such statements have, to be sure, been
explained as merely incidental ways of speaking, but the unbiased reader
of the Bible will maintain that in the whole of Holy Scripture no such
manner of speaking occurs that is not grounded in a relationship truly
existing in the person or thing designated. In this conviction the
Formula of Concord, following the guidance of older teachers of the
church, such as Leo I, has assembled the content of the statements
mentioned, and thereby demonstrated that the scriptural doctrine of the
person of Christ obliges us to hold the Lord Christ, according to his
human nature also, to be present wherever he is present according to
his promise. Let no one, however, misunderstand our confession on this
point: it does not assert the presence named of one who would be
nothing but a man, but only of him who is true God and true man in one
person; it does not mean a presence by virtue of which a space would be
filled by the one present, but only that presence which lies in the
almighty power of the Lord Jesus; by its appeal to the teaching of Holy
Scripture concerning this presence of Christ, it means only to show the
unscriptural character of that objection, as though the Lord Christ
could not, according to his human nature also, be near enough to us to
offer us his body and his blood for an oral — namely, sacramental —
partaking. The bestowal of these gifts of grace itself, both at the
first celebration of the Holy Supper and at every later one, it
ascribes, like the authors of the Syngramma Suevicum (Brenz and others),
to the word of the personally present Lord Christ that is added to
bread and wine in the Holy Supper — that same powerful word by which he
upholds all things and by which he performed so many a wonder and sign
of his almighty power. One will indeed have to grant our confession that
its dogma of the Holy Supper agrees with Scripture not merely in
appearance but in truth, when it declares the partaking of the body and
blood of Christ in the Holy Supper to be just as real, or oral, as the
partaking of bread and wine at the same celebration — and indeed
describes both the union of the former with the latter and the former by
itself as sacramental, that is, as occurring only in the sacrament and
withheld from our understanding by God himself. The unconditional
obedience which it thereby evidently renders to the Word of God would
readily be acknowledged, were it not that people have grown accustomed,
everywhere that God himself has given no explanation, to offering and
demanding explanations of their own devising; but so thoroughly has this
habit taken hold that people credit even others — even the Lutheran
confession — with such a venture, and accordingly, for instance, just
recently in the Lutheran Observer the error of consubstantiation has been