# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1858_S283
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Illusions of Present-Day Theologians etc.                    283

by this union makes the earthly elements into the Lord's (sacramental)
body and blood. (Cf. p. 149ff.: "In point of fact the transfiguration of the
Lord gives no little light of explanation to those weighty words (take,
eat, this is my body). Even if he had not expressly had in mind his own
mild transfiguration that had taken place that night, the words of the
institution would nonetheless compel us to refer them to his body in a
transfigured state, because of the untransfigured, naturally heavy and
limited body it could not be said at all: take, eat, this is my body. Neither
in the literal (Capernaitic) sense could such an eating be conceived of as
a deadly rending of the flesh of Christ, nor yet in the figurative sense,
since it would in that sense too be monstrous to picture the natural compact
body symbolically under the bread and then to consume it in effigy as a
memorial, whereas a pictorial remembrance deserved to be conserved. Still,
at the institution of the Holy Supper the Lord as Son of Man is externally
present among his disciples with his visible body, while from within his
being, consecrated to his own, opens itself and is transfigured for
communication, for communion. It is the energy of the divine
transfiguration of his human nature whereby the holy body of Christ
dynamically surrounds itself with invisible eradiations and emanations of
its being, which he still now conceals, but which he lets become visible
as a cloud of glory at his glorious exaltation to the right hand of the
Father. This very body, destined to be given up for his own, for the
blood-shedding sacrifice and then for a new eternal transfiguration, he
wills to communicate to them in a holy mystery of love for essential
communion with him, the head, who assimilates his members to himself.
This he does by handing them the visible blessed bread to enjoy with the
word: this is my body, in an invisible, imponderable, wonderful manner,
in that he embraces and permeates the consecrated food, which he touches
with his hands and over which he speaks the blessing word of his mouth,
with that invisible breath, or with the outflow and inflow of the
transfigured substance of his body, and so raises it into communion with
that body. Therefore he says in the full reality of truth, of the broken
bread, abolishing and transforming its previous natural purpose: take, eat,
this is my body. Yes indeed, what he now bids them eat is, as He, the
Lord, the Almighty, says, his body, his true body, because He, in whom
all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily, fills and impregnates it in a
mysterious way with the true, most intensive or most essential being of
his body. In such a dynamically communicative manner, then, the blessed
bread is the body of Christ."" On p. 159 there is discussion of the truth
of the doctrine "'according to which the bread is the body of Christ
through the same penetrating communication of the essential presence of
the God-man, which surrounds what it penetrates, as rays surround a
center."' P. 215: "'When he, the God-man, the tenderest being of his
body and the transfigured