# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1848 02 22_S101
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

...true, real blood. The words are plainly so clear and so simple that any child can understand them, and only one who begins to take counsel with his proud reason and his unbelieving heart could hit upon the idea of not wanting to take them in their proper meaning. In the words themselves there is not the slightest ground for this.

2.) Another well-founded reason for taking the words of institution in question in a figurative sense would be if they were elsewhere in Holy Scripture explained as figurative and expounded according to their proper sense. This occurs not infrequently in Holy Scripture. Not only is it expressly said of all the parables (figurative speeches) occurring in Holy Scripture that they are indeed parables, and that therefore the words occurring in them have a hidden, non-literal sense, but we also find, not infrequently, that individual figurative expressions are elsewhere designated and expounded as such. For example, the word "leaven" is used by Christ in Matthew 16:6; the apostles at first understand this word literally, but soon afterward we learn (verse 12) that Christ had spoken of it figuratively and had meant the false "doctrine" of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Further, according to John 2:19, Christ once spoke of a "temple," which the Jews likewise understood literally; but the evangelist says that Christ had spoken figuratively here and had meant by the temple his "body" (verse 21). Further, Christ says in Luke 11:20 that he casts out the devil by the "finger of God"; this is explained by Matthew 12:28, where it says: "But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God," etc. — Is there, then, perhaps found such an explanation of the words: "This is my body; this is my blood," as Mark (14:22, 24) recorded them, in the writing of another evangelist or apostle? — By no means. — Neither Matthew, nor Luke, nor St. Paul, who likewise report the institution of the Holy Supper, give even the slightest indication that those words are to be understood non-literally; none of them says: "This is a sign, a symbol, a seal, a pledge, a remembrance of my body," etc., but rather all four reporters speak with one voice of the "body and blood" of Christ himself. Thus even in a parallel passage there is not the least ground for taking those words of institution non-literally; indeed, we shall hear further below that all the other passages of the New Testament pertaining to the Holy Supper serve only to establish the proper meaning of the words of institution as the sole correct and irrefutable one.

(To be continued.)

On the Power of the Keys, Absolution, and Confession.
(From Harleß's periodical.)
(Continuation.)

How exceedingly gracious is the Lord, who, because he knows the little faith, the timidity, the fickleness of our natural mind, has not only given us the many dearly guaranteed and sworn promises of his Word to support and strengthen our faith, but has also added the two holy Sacraments as two great, self-affixed seals, attached with his own hand to the royal charter of his Word, in order to assure us all the more firmly of the forgiveness of our sins. But that is not all — he has also instituted the office of the keys, and seals to us his promise, his gracious will, his love, through the mouth of his servants. He has ordained many means to make our heart certain that through faith in Christ and his merit we have forgiveness of sins; an honest soul that stands in poverty of spirit and hungers and thirsts after righteousness despises none of them, but cries out to the Lord in thanks: We are lacking in no gift (1 Cor. 1:7)! Only a haughty spirit, walking about on false spiritual heights, who has not learned or has unlearned what daily repentance is, will despise absolution on account of an inner assurance of grace. Where you do not seek forgiveness in the Word, says Luther from his own experience, you will gape in vain toward heaven for grace, or, as they say, for the inward forgiveness. The Lord, who ordained the office of the keys and, in addition to Word and Sacrament, also added absolution as an inexhaustible spring of comfort for his church, knows indeed the needs of souls best, and that absolution meets them has been confirmed by countless facts throughout all times. Therefore the Lord himself, through his Spirit, has guided our church so that, although it had to reject the papist auricular confession as a torture bench of consciences in order to stand fast in the freedom with which Christ has set us free, it nevertheless fully acknowledges the divine authority of the power of the keys, as the center point of the cure of souls, and the power of the binding and loosing key, valid before God and through God, standing firm on the foundation of the divine Word. On the path of thorough contrition of heart and deep recognition of human corruption, our first confessors had recognized that heart and conscience, when they are crushed by the Law of God and feel the wrath of God, can be raised up only through the assurance of divine grace by means of the Word, and especially also by means of the comforting word of absolution. Faith is strengthened through the preaching of the Gospel, through the word of absolution, through the receiving of the Sacrament, so that it does not perish in such terrors and anxieties of conscience — that is the doctrine that resounds toward us everywhere out of our confessional writings. "It seems as nothing," writes Luther, "when a troubled person is absolved of sins; but if one could rightly consider it, and set against it both the office and the treasure that is thereby given, then all the office, power, and all the goods that kings and emperors and the world possess are, by comparison, a mere nothing."

The power of the keys which the Lord has granted to the ministry is, however, no judicial, no worldly power, as it is made into in the Roman church, but a purely spiritual one, directed at the inner man. For spiritual and worldly government are, as our confessional writings teach in opposition to the confounding of the two in the Roman church, to be strictly distinguished; the civil authority bears the sword (Rom. 13:4), the church has no other means of discipline and defense than the Word of God. As Christ was not sent into the world to judge the world, but that the world through him might be saved (John 3:17), so too he did not set his disciples as judges, but as messengers of salvation; not as lords over our faith, but as helpers of our joy (2 Cor. 1:24); they are the friends of the bridegroom, who would gladly bring the congregation to him as a spotless virgin; he has given them power to build up and not to destroy (2 Cor. 10:8); he has commanded them to shepherd the flock willingly and from the bottom of their hearts, not to lord it over them (1 Peter 5:2,3). "You know," he says to the apostles, "that the worldly princes lord it over their subjects, and those in authority exercise power: it shall not be so among you." (Matt. 20:25,26). He showed them, by the image of a child, that all their greatness consists in self-abasement (Matt. 18). The fleshly zeal of John and James, unsuited to the time of the New Testament, he rebuffs with the words: "Do you not know of what spirit you are children? The Son of Man has not come to destroy men's souls, but to save them." (Luke 9:55,56). The apostles are, when they are not received, to shake the dust from their feet; they are, when persecuted in one city, to flee into another (Matt. 10). They were equipped with the gift of working miracles only as proof that the kingdom of heaven had drawn near; otherwise they had no other weapon than the cause of the Lord, for whom they lived and were ready to die, the protection of God, their prayer, and their tears. So too the binding and loosing key should be for the ministry only a means of exercising the cure of souls for the salvation of souls all the more powerfully and emphatically; woe to those who in any way abuse it as a tool of their own selfishness! It is profaned when the members of the church are thereby enslaved under human authority; when honest souls are thereby tormented, weak consciences thereby confused, or anyone — even were they despisers — thereby externally harmed. The Lord's charge to the office extends no further than to release the penitent from the burden of their sins, but to bind the impenitent, so long as they remain in the state of impenitence, to their terror. Both happen through the Word — whoever hears it, hears it; whoever does not hear it,