# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S241
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

241

Hengstenberg on Eucharistic Fellowship with the
Calvinists.

Thus writes Hengstenberg in this year's preface to the "Ev. K. Z." [Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung]:

The Augsburg Confession sets forth the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord's Supper as an article of faith and expressly rejects the contrary teaching: "Of the Lord's Supper it is thus taught, that the true body and blood of Christ are truly present under the form of bread and wine in the Supper and are distributed and received. Wherefore the contrary teaching also is rejected."* If Luther's Small Catechism says: the Sacrament of the Altar is the true body and blood of the Lord Christ in and under the bread and wine, and the Large Catechism: it is the true body and blood of the Lord Christ in and under the bread and wine — how then can there be a fundamental fellowship at the Supper between those who adoringly reverence this highest of all mysteries and those who deny it? The doctrine of the Lutheran Church itself excludes from her Supper those who deviate from it, and to touch this doctrine, to set aside the confession of the Lutheran Church, is what it means when one would compel her to grant unconditional fellowship at the Supper to the Reformed.

Against such fellowship at the Supper with the Reformed all Lutheran theologians† have, following Luther's example, always declared themselves, even a Spener. Dr. Jul. Müller indeed thinks**: "Had Luther, in his struggle with the Swiss, been confronted chiefly with such a doctrine of the Supper as that developed by Calvin, he would even then hardly have refrained from asserting his own; but he would certainly never have ventured, for the sake of this difference, to abolish the division of the churches." But the opposite is clearly evident from history. Calvin received his doctrine of the Supper from Bucer, and in essentials there is no difference between the two. In this doctrine, however, Luther, after he had fully informed himself concerning it, recognized no improvement, but rather on the contrary a worsening, because the abiding great and grave harm was thereby concealed. He writes in a letter from his last years††: "But I beg in the Lord, that you let not yourselves be deceived and misled, [thinking] that the men of Zurich are as

* The powerless attempt made from the Reformed side to empty the 10th article of the Augsburg Confession of its Lutheran content (Dr. Heppe), has been rebuffed and refuted by a Reformed theologian with commendable impartiality — C. Olevianus and Z. Ursinus, by Pastor Sudhoff, Frankfurt am Main, Elberfeld [18]57, p. 61f.

† Erhard Schnepf, for example, declared, when he had been called by Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, alongside the Zwinglian Ambrosius Blaurer, to the work of the Reformation, immediately upon his arrival in Stuttgart to the Duke: "he could build at the house of the Lord together with Blaurer only if the latter were of one mind with him in the doctrine of the Holy Supper" — Roemer, Kirchliche Geschichte Württembergs, p. 171.

** On the Union, p. 328.

†† W. W. [Walch's Werke] 17, p. 2633.