# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S265
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Some Remarks on a New Apology of the Reformed Church. 265

and a regenerating baptism of adults? Does not the Apostle say, on the contrary: "One Lord, one faith, one baptism"? Ephesians 4:5.

Mr. K. may well glory in the fact that his Reformed Church has broken completely with Rome; but if it no longer believes that holy Baptism is truly a bath of regeneration, and that for children too, then with that it has broken not with Rome but with holy Scripture, with Christ and all the holy Apostles, and has stamped upon itself the mark of unbelief and sectarianism. And when that denial of the clear word of God on the part of the Reformed Church is the first reason Mr. K. gives for "why we are not Lutheran but Reformed," he only proves thereby that nothing but his own sympathies for the rationalistic distortion of divine revelation draw him to it.

Lic. Krummacher continues:

"In the doctrine of the holy Supper the Lutheran teaching certainly comes very near to the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation, in that it ties the presence of the true and real body and blood of Christ to the elements of the Supper, and thus, consequently, also ascribes to the unbeliever the enjoyment of the true body and blood of Christ — to him who yet lacks every organ for the reception and discernment of the body and blood of Christ. Our Reformed Church has wholly put away this Roman leaven, of which a little already spoils the whole lump, in that it ascribes the blessings of the holy Meal only to believers — to whom, indeed, it also reckons those souls who are wrestling, sighing, and therefore pleading after a living faith — and holds fast, with an appeal to John 6, to: 'It is the Spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I speak, they are spirit, and they are life.'"

Marginal remarks: Here too, then, it is not the lack of scriptural warrant in the Lutheran doctrine that is the reason why Mr. K. will not be Lutheran but Reformed, but rather because, as he says, the Lutheran doctrine of the holy Supper comes at any rate very near to the Roman. And what are the points of contact supposed to be? First, this: that our Church "ties the presence of the true and real body and blood of Christ to the elements of the Supper." A strange logic! The Roman Church makes the elements vanish entirely, while the Lutheran ties to them the presence of the body and blood of Christ — and so the two come close to one another in doctrine! We should have thought that this proved rather the opposite, namely how far apart the two doctrines stand. Yet, since nothing depends on whether one doctrine comes near another, but everything on whether it is taken from God's word, we will grant the writer this point too. But what kind of reproach is it that, according to Lutheran doctrine, the presence of the body and blood of Christ is tied to the elements of the Sacrament? To what else, then, in all the world should it be tied? If it is not tied to them, why then do the Reformed gentlemen not celebrate the Supper without bread and wine? And does not Christ himself say, reaching the bread: "This is my body," and the wine