# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 02 22_S100
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

non-literal, pictorial, and generally in a meaning which it has acquired only through a certain transference.

From this some may perhaps conclude that it has thereby been conceded by us ourselves that everyone therefore has the right to take also the words "body and blood" in the holy Lord's Supper as tropical expressions, that is, to take them in a non-literal sense. But this by no means follows from that concession. It is by no means thereby said that one may take the words in Holy Scripture however one pleases, and that it stands within the reader's discretion whether he wishes to leave a word in the Bible its proper meaning, or to give it some non-literal, figurative meaning. Were that within the reader's pleasure, then, to be sure, a certainty of faith among Christians would be impossible; the Bible would then be a foundation of sand on which no one could build; there would be no doctrine so absurd that it could not then be proved from Holy Scripture. An example of this a certain pope furnished in a letter addressed to the Emperor at Constantinople (Ex c. Solite, de majoritate), in which, among other things, it says: "Hast thou not read that God made two great lights, the sun (that is, the pope), and the moon (that is, the emperor)? By as much as the sun is greater than the moon, by so much does the pope surpass the emperor." — Is that not a lovely exegesis!? — You see, dear reader, on this path even the antichristian papacy can be justified from Holy Scripture; indeed, by means of Scripture one can in this way make, out of Yes — No, out of black — white, out of the devil — God.

But no! Just as there are definite laws and rules according to which the true sense of human speech in general is to be determined, so also there are definite laws and rules by which an interpreter must be guided when he wishes to decide, in a particular case, whether a word in a passage is to be taken properly or non-literally, in its original or in a tropical meaning. For is it credible that a reasonable man would use a non-literal expression instead of the proper one, if he had no reason at all for doing so? Certainly not. From this, however, the following necessarily follows: where there is no reason present why an interpreter of Scripture should abandon the proper meaning of a word and must understand it non-literally, that is already, for an interpreter, an important reason for taking the proper meaning of a word as the one intended by the Holy Spirit; if, on the other hand, various reasons can furthermore be shown which advise against departing from the proper sense of a word — reasons which prove that the author, in the context in which the word stands, must necessarily have used the proper mode of speech — then it is plainly not only most foolish, but also wicked and godless, to depart from the proper sense of the word out of some impure ulterior motive. Quite truly, therefore, Luther writes in his book "On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church," § 30: "One should do violence to the divine Word neither through any man nor through any angel; but as far as it is at all possible, the words are to be kept in their very simplest sense; and where no manifest circumstance compels us, they are not to be taken outside their proper sense (extra grammaticam, as it stands in the Latin edition), so that no occasion be given to adversaries to mock the whole of Scripture." What Luther understands by the "compelling circumstances" of which he speaks here, he shows in his renowned work against Erasmus, "That the Free Will Is Nothing." There he writes, § 368, as follows: "We ought rather to hold that in any passage of Scripture neither a consequence nor a trope is to be assumed, unless the manifest circumstances of the words, or the manifest absurdity of the matter offending against an article of faith, necessarily requires it; but everywhere one should hold fast to the simple, original, and natural meaning of the words which grammar and usage give, just as God himself created it. For if everyone were permitted to invent consequences and tropes in Holy Scripture according to his own pleasure, what would Scripture then be but a reed which the wind moves this way and that, or a very Vertumnus, taking on every shape? Then in truth nothing certain could be assumed and proved in any article of the faith, since one could make sport of it, saying: it is a trope. As the very worst poison, therefore, every trope is rather to be avoided, to whose acceptance Holy Scripture itself does not compel us. See how it fared with that Origen, with his trope-making in the exposition of Holy Scripture; what a fine opportunity he thereby gave to Porphyry to declare everything a fraud, so that even Jerome thinks that those who defend Origen accomplish little! What befell the Arians with their trope, by which they made Christ a mere titular god? What has, in our own time, befallen those new prophets in the words: This is my body? where one seeks a trope in the pronoun "this," another in the verb "is," another in the noun "body"? I have made the observation that all the heresies and errors touching Scripture have arisen, not, as is said almost throughout the world, from the simplicity of the words, but rather from this, that men have set aside the simple sense of the words and have devised out of their own heads tropes and consequences." —

According to this, the answer to the question lies close at hand: Why are the words of institution, "This is my body; this is my blood," to be taken properly? For this reason, namely:

I. Because no cause is present why we should abandon the proper meaning of these words and be obliged to take them non-literally.

1.) A reason for this would exist if the words "This is my body; this is my blood" contained wholly customary tropical expressions, at once recognizable by everyone. For there are, indeed, in all languages certain expressions which occur quite commonly in a tropical sense, or which are nevertheless at once recognized, understood, and accepted by everyone as tropes. Every man recognizes at once, for example, that a writer is speaking figuratively when he ascribes to an object something wholly foreign to it — say, something bodily to the spiritual and something spiritual to the bodily, something living to the dead, and the like; as, for example, when he speaks of the "ground" of an assertion, of a "laughing" meadow, of a "bold" mountain, and so forth. Now since God, in Holy Scripture, employs human language for the revelation of his mysteries, just as all the world uses it; since God, in the Bible, as far as outward form is concerned, speaks as a man speaks (for otherwise Scripture would be no revelation for men at all) — it is certain that the figurative expressions otherwise current in human speech, when they occur in Holy Scripture, must there too be taken not properly, but non-literally or figuratively. When, for example, it says: "As often as ye drink of this cup" (1 Cor. 11:26), there is a compelling reason to take the word "cup" non-literally, because it is, in all languages, quite customary (by virtue of a trope which one calls synecdoche) to take the word "cup" for what is contained in the cup; every man recognizes this at once as a trope and understands it. Whoever, therefore, wished to take the word "cup" here in its proper meaning would be the very one departing from the letter of Scripture, for the true meaning of this word, in connection with the words "to drink thereof," is not at all a drinking vessel, but the beverage contained in it. Just as easily, moreover, does everyone recognize that in the following passages of Scripture certain expressions are to be taken non-literally: "All the trees shall clap their hands." Isa. 55:13. "My soul lieth in the dust." Psalm 119:25. "Ye have plowed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity, ye have eaten the fruit of lies." Hos. 10:13. "Hear attentively the noise of his voice." Job 37:2. — We now ask, are the words "This is my body; this is my blood" likewise such expressions as anyone who knows the language even a little at once, at first glance, recognizes and accepts as figurative expressions? — Nothing less than this. — On the contrary! Nothing more singular can be conceived than that Christ, speaking of "his body which is given" and of "his blood which is shed," should thereby mean something other than his true, real body and his true