# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1861_S3
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Preface to the 1861 Volume.   3

— von Hofmann, Thomasius, and Delitzsch in the doctrine of the Person of Christ, the first also regarding the atonement; Rudelbach in the doctrine of ordination and of Hades; Löhe, Münchmeyer and others in the doctrine of the ministry; Löhe, Luthardt, Delitzsch, von Hofmann, H. Kurtz, and a whole host with them in the doctrine of the last things, namely of the thousand-year kingdom; Delitzsch, Kliefoth and others in the doctrine of the efficacy of the sacraments — as all of this has already been documented in previous volumes of this journal with the relevant excerpts from the writings of the named theologians. As for the doctrine of the efficacy of the sacraments, Professor Dr. Kahnis, unfortunately, likewise declares in his work "Die Lehre vom Abendmahle" [The Doctrine of the Lord's Supper] (Leipzig, Dörffling und Franke, 1851) that on this point he cannot follow the confession of the church. He writes: "One must openly admit that the Lutheran definition of the purpose of the Lord's Supper is unfounded. If the truth is wholly on his (Luther's) side in the defense of the reception of the true body and blood of Christ, then he robs this basic fact of its force when he does not see in it the purpose of the Lord's Supper, but only a pledge of the appropriation of the word of the forgiveness of sins. This word is, as we have seen above, only an attribute of the body of Christ, on which the main weight does not rest. 'This is my body' — that is what everything hinges on." (Even as concerns its purpose?!) "This word, however, only declares a fact. This fact, not the word, is the main thing. Luther reverses the relation: the appropriation of the body of Christ is, for him, subservient to the appropriation of the word. From this view it was inevitable that the specific meaning of the Lord's Supper should escape him. And this dualism between what the Lord's Supper is and what it is supposed to do, Luther" (it should be added: and the Lutheran church — for she too has in this matter adopted Luther's teaching as one firmly grounded in God's Word, and has expressed it symbolically as her own) "never overcame: the Lord's Supper is the bodily partaking of the true body of Christ, and indeed of the glorified body." (To what purpose this addition?) "It is meant to appropriate to the believer the word of the forgiveness of sins." (Kahnis supports this with the answers to the first, third, and fourth questions of the last chief part in Luther's Small Catechism.) ... "This whole notion — that in the Lord's Supper the forgiveness of sins is received — rests on an inversion of the relation of the word to the specific content of the sacrament in general, on a false interpretation of the word 'given for you, shed for you' in particular. In general, the concept of the sacrament has not come to its full development in the Lutheran church. The fundamental concepts of word and faith have been attached to it too directly. In the Apology the sacrament is only a qualified word, verbum visibile (a visible word), quasi pictura verbi seu sigillum (as it were a picture or seal of the word), which, like the word, has the power of the forgiveness of sins only through faith. Before