# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1898_S17
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

of the Ev. Luth. Synodical Conference of North America. 1898. 17

The Sacrament of the Altar is, after all, by its very nature a *communio*, not, like baptism, a sacrament that from the outset has just the one person to be baptized as its object, but a sacrament that from the outset presupposes a fellowship of several. Already the words of institution and the whole course of the institution let the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper be recognized as just such a meal of the LORD as Christ wants to hold with his congregation. Where deviations occur in the practice of the Lord's Supper, insofar as it is determined by the LORD Christ himself, this must for that reason alone appear very questionable and make one doubt the unity in spirit, in faith, in doctrine and in confession, beginning with the Lord's Supper. Next, the Lord's Supper is a means of grace, not our means of grace (men cannot institute means of grace) but God's means of grace. He wants to work through it what he wants to work, and it is neither more nor less than what God, when he instituted this means of grace, wanted to make of it and has made of it. Not more: not a means by which God irresistibly enforces his will by an absolute working of omnipotence; nor a means for healing bodily sickness. Not less: not merely an announcement of God's grace, not merely a testimony of God's love in Christ, not only a reminder of the atoning sacrifice of our High Priest, but, as Gospel, it is a power of God to save; it has the power to give what it announces, and to effect the appropriation and acceptance. The Sacrament of the Altar is a means of God's grace, a sacrament by which he himself, the LORD, offers, appropriates and seals the goods of his grace to the communicants. And indeed the LORD Christ instituted this sacrament, as we confess in the catechism, for us Christians to eat and to drink. For Christians, for his disciples, he established this sacrament. The preaching is to resound far and wide, to go through all lands, even where it reaches heathen ears, that it may prove its life-giving power on the spiritually dead. Of the Lord's Supper we know that it is instituted for us Christians to eat and to drink, for those who can examine themselves and partake worthily of what is offered here, and that it is not to be given to those who would partake of it to their judgment.

Since this is so, a Christian congregation, as one among many, should also be aware that when it here either orders or permits that in its midst the sacrament be given also to others, also to unbelievers, also to those who as impenitent sinners have been placed under the ban by a sister congregation, it thereby sins, 1. against the instruction of God and of our Savior Jesus Christ, who instituted this sacrament, and 2. also against the principle that in the church, where Christians walk with one another and beside one another and before one another, one does not do the other any