# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1847 08 17_S141
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Der Lutheraner.

"God's Word and Luther's teaching shall never pass away."

Published by C. F. W. Walther.

Volume 3.

St. Louis, Mo., August 24, 1847.

No. 26.

Terms: The Lutheraner appears once every two weeks, for a subscription price of one dollar for out-of-town subscribers, who must pay half of this in advance and bear the postage themselves. — In St. Louis, each individual number is sold for 5 cents.

(Submitted.)
God with us!

Still our mighty victorious hero remains with his host,
And his Word the true doctrine,
Which in the end carries the prize;
Still faith must triumph,
Which trusts the Word alone,
And the dragon must succumb
In the deepest torment of hell.

Let all devils mock
Against God's only Son,
Let all bands of fanatics
Speak scorn upon the Anointed One,
Yes! though the world should join together
Against God's band of children:
Zion remains firmly founded,
Zion remains forever.

Let them revile us with venom,
We bear every scorn;
But if they twist God's Word,
That our God will not endure:
He will punish the seducers
Who have hardened their own hearts,
And have lured so many of his sheep
Away into ruin.

Yes! these are the last times,
Already the last woe begins.
Let us pray, watch, and strive,
That the Lord's will be done,
Until we see Christ come
Gloriously with the sound of trumpets,
That we may stand before him
Blessed together with all the saints.

Come, Lord Jesus! behold your own,
Hated by the whole world.
Ah! hear our weeping,
Ah, lighten our burden.
Yet you must surely overcome;
To you be eternal praise and glory.
Come, Lord Jesus! let us find
Rest in your sanctuary.
Hermann Fick.

The Lutheran Church and the Church Fathers on the Holy Supper.
In reply to an essay by Mr. Nast.

Mr. Nast had, as we already mentioned in the previous number, promised to make us better acquainted with the church fathers than we had become in Leipzig. In the 447th number of the Apologete, Mr. Nast has indeed indulged this desire of his to instruct us. In it he presents an essay under the title: "For the Instruction of Mr. Walther." Whether the reputation for great learning which Mr. Nast thereby intended to establish for himself has actually been substantiated by this, and whether he has thereby truly wrested the palm from the University of Leipzig and won it for the Methodist society of scholars in Cincinnati, will become evident in what follows.

The first assertion Mr. Nast makes, in order to show that the church fathers did not teach in accordance with the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper, is that they taught "neither the Roman transubstantiation nor the Lutheran consubstantiation." However much this endangers Mr. Nast's reputation as a scholar, we must at once state, for the sake of truth, that Mr. Nast unfortunately does not yet know the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper himself, and that his whole battle is therefore directed against a phantom — a battle in which, of course, no honor could possibly be won, even if Mr. Nast were to display ever so great acuity and ever so great learning. Mr. Nast, who, as we have seen, is accustomed to draw his articles from the realm of scholarship always at second or third hand, must, unfortunately, also with regard to the Lutheran doctrine of the Holy Supper have come across some Reformed book in which the Lutheran church was credited with the doctrine of a "consubstantiation."

To be sure, it is not really proper for the pupil to wish to instruct his teacher, but in a case such as the present one we hope for forgiveness if we here prefer truth to propriety. So let Mr. Nast know that the doctrine of a consubstantiation (or, as a learned Methodist wrote some time ago in the Apologete, of a "contranssubstantiation"!!) has not been adopted by the Lutheran church, but has always been expressly rejected as a thoroughly unbiblical doctrine. For while transubstantiation, as taught by the Roman church, means the change by which bread and wine lose their essence and become the body and blood of Christ, consubstantiation, by contrast, denotes such an alteration by which two essences are mixed together into one new double essence, so that the bread with the body and the wine with the blood of Christ in the Holy Supper would be united somewhat as water is united with wine, when the latter is poured into the former.*) This coarse, disgusting, Capernaitic notion — which drags the most holy mystery of the sacramental presence of Christ in the Holy Supper down into the carnal — has always been an abomination to the Lutheran church, which is far from ever having taught it. Among other things, the Formula of Concord states: "They (the Lutherans) confess, according to the words of Irenaeus, that in this sacrament there are two things, one heavenly and one earthly; accordingly they hold and teach that with the bread and wine the body and blood of Christ are truly and essentially present, and are given and received, and although they do not believe in a transubstantiation, that is, an essential change of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, nor hold that the body and blood of Christ are enclosed in the bread locally, that is, spatially, or otherwise permanently united with it apart from the use of the sacrament, yet they grant that through sacramental union the bread is the body of Christ."†) (Repetition, Art. 7.) Furthermore, it states there: "But when Dr. Luther or we use the word 'spiritual' in this matter, we thereby mean the spiritual, supernatural, heavenly manner in which Christ is present in the Holy Supper, working not only comfort and life in believers but also judgment in unbelievers; by which we reject the Capernaitic notions of a coarse, carnal presence, which are imputed and forced upon our churches by the Sacramentarians, contrary to all our manifold public testimony — in which sense we also say that the body and blood of Christ are received, eaten, and drunk spiritually in the Holy Supper, although such partaking occurs with

*) Others here use the comparison with artocreas.

†) These words were incorporated into the Formula of Concord from the Wittenberg Concord of 1536.