# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_August 1858_S242
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

242 What a Precious Gift of God We Have in Our Synodical Fellowship.

Bullinger and Pellican, or even Bucer himself." He writes to the people of Frankfurt: "In sum, it is dreadful for me to hear that in one and the same church and at one and the same altar both parties should fetch and receive one and the same sacrament, and one party should believe that it receives mere bread and wine, while the other party believes that it receives the true body and blood of Christ." — "Some, now that they see that the cart has been driven too far and too deep into the mud, twist their words otherwise, yet retain the same opinion as before in mind and in practice. They say with their mouth that Christ's body and blood are truly present in the sacrament. But the secret gloss and understanding is this, that the true body and blood of Christ are indeed present, but only spiritually and not bodily; and are received only in the heart by faith, and not bodily with the mouth, which receives mere bread and wine as before. See, is this not a devilish juggling trick played with the words of Christ, whereby simple hearts are so shamefully deceived and robbed of their sacrament?" — "I count them all in one basket, whoever they may be, who will not believe that the Lord's bread in the Holy Supper is his true and natural body, which the ungodly man or Judas receives with the mouth just as much as St. Peter or a saint."

That Luther saw rightly, that the Bucer-Calvinist doctrine was no essential advance, we have already shown repeatedly. It indeed found its place on paper in several Reformed confessions, but it never penetrated into the heart of the Reformed church. However sharp the oversight of doctrine was in that church — sharper, indeed, than in the Lutheran — as one can see, for example, from the proceedings of the Synod of Dort, and also from the interesting "Proceedings Concerning the Errors of J. J. Wetstein" of the year 1730, there was never a firm stand taken on the Calvinist doctrine in its distinction from the Zwinglian. One rightly sensed that it (as indeed the Consensus Tigurinus already shows) has its significance more outwardly than inwardly. Even before the rise of rationalism, little was to be felt of Calvinist doctrine in the Reformed church. The well-traveled Zinzendorf, certainly an unprejudiced observer, says*: "In the Reformed religion one holds — if not in theory, then in practice — the sacraments to be merely certain holy ceremonies, by which one or another holy thing is signified."

————◆————

What a Precious Gift of God We Have in Our Synodical
Fellowship.

This is also brought home to us clearly by the following excellent words of the Evangelical Church Gazette, which indeed have primarily the circumstances of the Prussian

* Jeremias, a preacher of righteousness, Berlin 1830, p. 229.