# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1858_S281
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Illusions of Present-Day Theologians etc.                    281

thank you for your testimony and accept it, or else they should
refute it from God's Word. If they cannot and will not do that,
well then! let them go their way with the platform against the Bible. It will not
go much better for them in their contest for their paper pope than it
went for the Romans in their contest for their human pope.
The truth of the Reformation, the pure, strict Lutheranism, will carry
the victory, and all who set themselves against it must be put to shame,
for the Lord is King forever and ever!
                                                                              Schick.

Illusions of Present-Day Theologians
Regarding
the Pure Lutheran Doctrine of the Holy Supper.

     The confession that the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper is the sole
correct one, the biblical one, is becoming ever more general in our days,
namely in Germany, among theologians. But whoever wanted to draw
the conclusion from this that the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper
is thereby being recognized more and more, finding acceptance and gaining
advocates among theologians, would bitterly deceive himself. As with other
doctrines, so it is with this one: it wants first to be clearly recognized
before it can rightly be confessed. And this is now all the more necessary
the more deeply certain preconceived opinions have taken root in our days,
and the greater the confusion of concepts that now prevails. Amid the
obscurity and vagueness of the manner of speech that has now become
customary, one has grown accustomed not to press very strictly the words
used by an author. So it happens only too often that one likewise does not
keep firmly in view the words used by our fathers, and therefore often
supposes oneself to have become one with the fathers, while one has in
fact only read one's own thoughts out of the fathers. Most theologians who
now declare that they have examined the Lutheran doctrine of the Supper,
found it correct, and made it their own, have not gotten beyond the
Calvinist doctrine of the sacrament — or rather, false doctrine; some
combine with it also the papist error of a mechanical operation of the
body and blood of Jesus Christ, which is, so to speak, inoculated into the
body of the communicant, and thereby fall at the same time into the
doctrine of deification held by the worst fanatics and enthusiasts.

     A remarkable evidence of what has been said is found in the following
work: "Meditations on the Revelations of the Glory of God in His Church,
and especially on the Presence of the Glorified Body and Blood of Christ
in the Holy Supper, by Dr. Ernst Sartorius.*) Stuttgart

     *) As is well known, General Superintendent Sartorius passes for the champion of
Lutheranism within the Prussian territorial church.