# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Mai 1856_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Is This, Then, the Theology of the American Lutheran Church? 141

...can be present, and thus also not in some hundred different places where communion is held at the same time.

Alongside these arguments of the "List," etc., in the Lutheran Observer, let us set those which Klein, Wegscheider, and Schulz — the well-known chiefs of rationalism — bring forward against the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper (compare Hutterus Redivivus, page 310):

a. It does not rest on Holy Scripture; the word "is" must be understood symbolically — it occurs often in Holy Scripture where it cannot possibly be understood otherwise, and here too it could not possibly have been understood otherwise by the apostles, who surely could not have supposed that they were eating the body of the Lord sitting before them; drinking blood was an abomination to the Jews; Paul, too, thinks only of a moral union with Jesus, and everywhere the effect of the Supper is presented as being of this kind, and hence conditioned upon worthy preparation — 1 Cor. 10:16ff.; 11:27; 12:13.

b. The sacramental union, the oral and supernatural partaking, are subtleties by which nothing clear can be conceived.

c. Ubiquity is unprovable; the omnipresence of a human, and therefore limited, body is a contradiction.

d. Experience proves that the effect of the Supper as celebrated in the orthodox sense is no different than among the Zwinglians.

e. With God and divine things only spiritual communion takes place.

f. For every unprejudiced, humanly feeling mind, there must be something horrifying in the thought of eating and drinking the flesh and blood of a human being, of a beloved human being. Appeal is made to the (pagan Roman) Cicero, who says in his book "On the Nature of the Gods" that although it is indeed a common figure of speech to call the grain Ceres and the wine Liber, no one is thought so mad as to take what he eats to be a god.

The arguments of the "List" in the Lutheran Observer agree with those of Klein, Wegscheider, and Schulz, the chiefs of rationalism; only the ordinary rationalists have not gone so far as to appeal, against the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper, to the testimony of the senses — namely, that one does not taste or see the body and blood of Christ. In this point the "List" follows the notorious Strauss, who detected in the churchly doctrine of the Holy Supper a taste of flesh and blood, on account of which it was also, in this sense, unfit to be the fraternal meal of humanity.

Is the theology of the "List" in the Observer the theology of the American Lutheran Church? — Oh no, it is the theology of ordinary rationalism, of Klein, Wegscheider, Schulz, and Strauss.

The doctrine of regeneration through Holy Baptism is presented in the "List" as though it claimed that baptism is necessarily and universally accompanied by spiritual regeneration, and that such water-baptism is absolutely required for salvation. The special article on regeneration through