# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1857_S261
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Real-Encyclopedia for Protestant Theology and Church. 261

sacraments, and particularly of the Holy Supper, and in doing so has already taken the standpoint indicated. But we fairly ask how it accords with the promised foundation — faith in the revelation of salvation in Christianity — when it is said in this article in so many words: "the blood of Christ which — according to the Lutheran doctrine — was contained in the cup and was received by the disciples cannot possibly belong to that which was later shed on the cross, unless the being contained in the cup and the being received by the disciples is at once to become a merely docetic matter." What? Is not God, according to the revelation of salvation in Christianity, an almighty God, as the children pray in the common Christian creed: "I believe in God the Father almighty"? But if, as no Christian can deny, God is almighty, what presumption it is to assert that the blood of Christ, the Son of God, which was contained in the cup, etc., cannot possibly belong to that which was later shed on the cross. Could not the almighty God bring even this to pass? And how would He then still be almighty? Or was Christ not the Son of the living God, true God begotten of the Father from eternity? One of the two the Doctor and Professor evidently does not believe; otherwise he could at the very least not deny the possibility that the same blood which was later shed on the cross was in the cup, and he would not at once speak of docetic semblance and jugglery. But if he does not believe that God is almighty, or that Christ is the Son of God and true God, how can he then be reckoned among the theologians "who by faithful adherence to the saving facts and doctrines of the faith of Christianity are called to further the work of the Spirit"? —

Yet according to the same article the matter in fact stands still worse, and it unhappily lets us look still more deeply into the bottomless theology of Dr. and Prof. Müller. For it reads there literally thus: "From this relation" (whether by this relation is to be understood a difference, mentioned immediately before, between the indwelling of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, or a distinction named further above between Christ's self-communicating efficacy in the Holy Supper and the efficacy of the Holy Spirit, cannot be clearly made out at all; nor does it matter further here, for this much is in itself only too clear and certain) "can also only then be truly understood through the doctrine of the justification of sinful man by faith in Christ. For little as we can agree with the view of Andreas Osiander in its whole context, he is nevertheless right in rejecting the notion" (hear and marvel!) "according to which God, by an arbitrary actus forensis (judicial act), declares man pure and righteous in contradiction to his actual condition, which is simply sinful and damnable. Rather the divine verdict which justifies the sinner who believes in Christ discloses the