# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1856_S175
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

"In, With, and Under." 175

...expressed more clearly that you let Christ be locally separated from us who are in the world."*)

This, now, was by no means merely Calvin's individual opinion. Rather, the German Reformed Church has adopted this Calvinistic type of the doctrine of the Holy Supper almost unchanged, and has publicly set it before Christendom in her chief confession as her own. The Heidelberg Catechism, namely, answers its 76th Question — "What does it mean to eat the crucified body of Christ and drink his shed blood?" — thus: "It means not only to embrace with a believing heart the whole suffering and death of Christ, and thereby to receive forgiveness of sins and eternal life, but also, besides this (!), through the Holy Spirit (!), who dwells at once in Christ and in us, to be united more and more with his blessed body, so that we, although he is in heaven and we are on earth, are nevertheless flesh of his flesh and bone of his bones, and live and are governed forever by one Spirit (as the members of a body are by one soul)." The 78th Question: "Do the bread and wine then become the very body and blood of Christ?" is then answered thus: "No; but as the water in Baptism is not changed into the blood of Christ, nor itself becomes the washing away of sins, but is only a divine sign and assurance of it, so too the holy bread in the Supper does not become the body of Christ itself, although, according to the nature and usage of sacraments, it is called the body of Christ." The 79th Question, finally: "Why then does Christ call the bread his body, and the cup his blood, or the New Testament in his blood, and [why does] St. Paul [call it] the communion of the body and blood of Jesus Christ?" has the following answer: "Christ speaks thus not without great reason: namely, that he wishes to teach us not only that, just as bread and wine sustain this temporal life, so also his crucified body and his shed blood are the true food and drink of our souls unto eternal life; but still more, that by this visible sign and pledge he wishes to assure us that we become as truly partakers of his true body and blood, through the working of the Holy Spirit, as we receive these holy signs with the bodily mouth in remembrance of him, and that all his suffering and obedience are as certainly our own as if we ourselves had suffered and made satisfaction for everything in our own person."

As great and as distressing as are the contortions which the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism engage in here, in order not to have to say straight out whether the body and blood of Christ are there or not, and how, then, properly to understand the words on which everything depends — "This is my body — this is my blood" — yet this much is only too clear: that they, like

*) "Si theses tuas duobus tantum in locis aliquantum flecteres, faceres appo-
sitissime, nempe ut clarius exprimeres, te locorum distantia Christum a nobis, qui
in mundo sumus, disjungere." (Epist. ed. Beza, p. 179.)