# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1863_S266
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

reaching it: "This is my blood"? As surely as Christ spoke these words, and did not say: Believe, and so you receive my body, etc., so surely is the presence of the body of Christ tied to the element of the Sacrament, and not, as the Calvinists would have it, to faith. If this now seems to Mr. K. to come too near the Roman doctrine, he must settle that with the Lord Christ himself.

Mr. K. raises a further objection against the Lutheran doctrine of the Supper, that it "thus, consequently, ascribes to the unbeliever too the enjoyment of the true body and blood of Christ." We answer that indeed, from the true presence of the body and blood of Christ in the holy Supper, it consequently follows that the enjoyment of these gifts belongs to all who partake, unbelievers as well as believers; but we Lutherans believe this not for the sake of mere logical consequence, but for the sake of the plain and clear word of God: "Whosoever eateth this bread unworthily, or drinketh of the cup of the Lord, is guilty of the body and blood of the Lord." 1 Corinthians 11:27. In this we pay no heed to the wretched sophistries by which the Reformed gentlemen have sought to nullify this unanswerable divine testimony that the unbelieving communicant too partakes of the body and blood of Christ; rather we hold to it all the more firmly, because it is precisely thereby made manifest whether a man truly believes in the presence of Christ in the holy Supper, or whether all his talk of the "real presence" and of the "true essential body" of Christ — expressions the Calvinists in particular use so freely — are mere turns of phrase meant to deceive the orthodox. Rightly, therefore, does Luther say in his last confession: "I reckon them all in one cake, that is, as sacramentarians and enthusiasts, as indeed they are, who will not believe that the Lord's bread in the Supper is his true, natural body, which the ungodly man or Judas receives with the mouth just as well as St. Peter and all the saints. Whoever, I say, will not believe this, let him leave me in peace and hope for no fellowship with me; nothing else will come of it." (Cited in the Formula of Concord, Article VII of the Solid Declaration.)

When Mr. K. adds, concerning unbelievers: "to whom, indeed, every organ for the reception and discernment of the body and blood of Christ is lacking," we remark the following: Mr. K. here commits a petitio principii [a begging of the question]. He does not believe in the real presence and the real enjoyment of the body and blood of Christ, but only in a spiritual presence for faith and a spiritual enjoyment of faith. Both of these, to be sure, cannot take place in unbelievers. But that this presence and this enjoyment are sacramental is precisely what has to be proved, not what can serve as proof. The matter stands the other way round; from the very fact that, according to God's word, the unbelieving communicants too partake of the body and blood of Christ, it is manifest that Christ['s