# Der Lutheraner_St. Louis Missouri_1845 02 22_S51
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

notorious iconoclast Carlstadt had already, before Zwingli, attacked the doctrine of the universal Christian church concerning the Holy Supper in public writings, this unfortunate fanatic could not have brought about a separation had not the highly esteemed Zwingli later taken up the cause. Even the Reformed writer Lavater states in his history of the sacramental controversy that the council of Zurich, where Zwingli resided, alarmed by the new teaching, at first forbade the sale of Carlstadt's books. For in the first seven years, namely from 1517 to 1524, during which Luther and Zwingli testified against the abominations of the papacy and, through the proclamation of the pure evangelical doctrine, brought about a true reform of the church—during this time Luther and Zwingli were entirely at one in doctrine.

This has always been admitted even by the more candid among the Reformed. Thus, among others, F. A. Lampe, Reformed professor at Utrecht, states in his church history (Utrecht edition, p. 332): "As for Zwingli's doctrine of the Supper, he himself confesses that he was at first inclined to Luther's view." We find this confirmed also in Zwingli's own writings. He himself writes, on October 9, 1523, to Geroldseck: "After the Supper, Christ gave forth his body and his blood." And in that same year Zwingli writes, in the German exposition of his articles, the following concerning the words of institution of the Holy Sacrament: "These words are clear and known to all people: This is my body. Is that not a plain, brief, certain word of God? How could God have spoken more briefly or more precisely?" To the objection that he would be called a Lutheran, Zwingli replied as follows: "Luther is as excellent a warrior of God as has never before been seen on earth in a thousand years, and in the manly, unshaken spirit with which he attacked the Pope of Rome, no one has ever equaled him for as long as the papacy has endured. Praise be to God! Through him a countless number of people, more than through me and others, are being led to God. That I have never in all my days written a single letter to him, I have done in order to make plain to everyone how harmonious the Spirit of God is, that we, though so far apart, teach the doctrine of Christ so unanimously, without any collusion." So Zwingli still wrote in the year 1523.

But by the end of the following year we find him suddenly, and substantially, changed in his conviction concerning the Holy Supper. He had come to the opinion that the words "This is my body" meant as much as "This signifies my body." We find this opinion expressed by him for the first time in a letter to the preacher Alberus in Reutlingen, dated November 16, 1524, in which, however, Zwingli still wished this opinion to be kept secret; for he added: "I adjure you by Jesus Christ that you show this letter to no one except one who is certainly known to be upright in the faith of this same our Lord."

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Zwingli, then, still trembled at the thought of coming forward publicly with his opinion, even before those whose agreement he did not yet expect; he knew well what a disastrous and dreadful upheaval this would cause in all the congregations which, up to then, had been shepherded and edified by one and the same doctrine, partly through him and partly through Luther, and which had stood in the most glorious and most lovely unity of spirit and confession against the antichristian papacy. Yet Zwingli soon grew bolder. Even before Luther had offended him with so much as a single word, Zwingli came forward in the year 1525 with his book On True and False Religion, in which he called all who believed in the essential presence of the body and blood of Christ "flesh-eaters," a "stupid (dim-witted) class of people," and called their doctrine "godless, foolish, and monstrous," belonging among the cannibals (man-eaters). (See: Commentarius de vera et falsa religione, pp. 238, 246, 256.)

When Zwingli shortly thereafter published another book, called Subsidium sive Coronis de Eucharistia, he now called the Lutheran faith outright idolatry, and the Lutherans outright cannibals.*) Indeed, when Luther thereupon defended himself, Zwingli wrote in his Exegesis ad Lutherum, p. 59: "Bucer has said, for the sake of peace, that one may think this way or that in this matter without loss of faith. I do not agree with him. To believe that eating the flesh of Christ strengthens the conscience is bound up with a loss of faith."

*) What it was that so suddenly fixed Zwingli in his error, he himself relates in the aforementioned Subsidium, section D iii. Having reported there that on April 11 he had publicly disputed about the Mass at Zurich with a certain town clerk, he continues: "But when the thirteenth of April came—I am telling what is true, and so true that, were I to suppress it, my conscience would compel me to reveal what the Lord has granted me, although I well know what mockery and laughter I thereby expose myself to—when, I say, the thirteenth day of April dawned, it seemed to me in a dream that I was again disputing, with great vexation, with that same opponent, the town clerk, and that I was so struck dumb that I could not utter what I nevertheless knew perfectly well, because my tongue refused to do its office. This distress seemed to put me quite beside myself, as dreams in the deceptive night sometimes play with us (for we relate, as far as we ourselves are concerned, nothing more than a dream, although it is no small thing that we learned through the dream, by God's grace, to whose honor alone we report this). Then it seemed to me that all at once an admonisher stood there (whether he was black or white I cannot recall, for I am reporting a dream); this one said: Why do you not answer him, faint-heart, what is written in Exodus 12, 'For it is the Passover,' which means the passing-over of the Lord? As soon as I had had this vision, I awoke and sprang out of bed. I then examined the passage first according to the Greek translation from every side, and thereupon spoke on it as best I could before the whole assembly—a speech which, where it was accepted, dispelled every cloud of doubt among all those who until then had still been uncertain on this point, because they thought that it was spoken only in a figure of speech (that is, that 'is' was taken for 'means')." — Zwingli's doctrine is thus built upon a dream.

Ought not, after this, all those to be ashamed to their very hearts who now write thoughtlessly that Luther bears the blame for the division of the Protestant church? Is it not, after this, altogether beyond contradiction, that Zwingli not only first separated himself from the old-believing evangelical Christians by a new doctrine that had been unheard of in Christendom since the time of the apostles, but also immediately attacked them like a madman, and, should they not accept his new doctrine, denied them the faith and hence salvation? Yet that device of the fanatics—to shift onto others what they themselves have caused and still cause daily—is already an old one. Already Luther, in his treatise "That These Words, This Is My Body, Still Stand Firm," had to lament as follows: "It happens to us as to the sheep that came with the wolf to drink at the water. The wolf stood upstream, the sheep stood downstream in the water. Then the wolf scolded the sheep for muddying his water. The sheep said: How could I muddy it for you? You stand above me, and it is you who muddy it for me. In short, the sheep had to bear the blame—it had to have muddied the water for the wolf. So it is also with my fanatics. They have lit the fire, which they themselves proudly boast of as a good deed, and now they want to shift the blame for the discord from themselves onto us. Who told Dr. Carlstadt to begin? Who told Zwingli and Oecolampadius to write? Did they not do it of their own accord? We would gladly have had peace, and still would; but they were unwilling to allow it; now the blame is ours—how right that is!" Here, however, perhaps many Evangelicals will say: we must, then, indeed admit that Zwingli was the author of the unfortunate separation, and not Luther; but could not Luther have restored peace, had he not remained so stiff and rigid on the words "This is my body"? Did not Zwingli later, in 1529 at Marburg, in vain beg Luther with tears for the hand of brotherhood, saying, "There are no people on earth with whom I would rather be united than with the Wittenbergers"? (Luther's Works, Halle edition, XVI, 2825.) Was it not unloving of Luther that he, with iron persistence, rejected this and all later offers of union with the so-called Reformed right up to his last breath? The Evangelicals will further say: Have not the Reformed, for the most part, been the very ones who for three hundred years have continually made new proposals for reunion with the Lutherans, proposals whose execution, however, has usually foundered on the harshness of quarrelsome Lutheran theologians? Is it not clear, then, that the Reformed indeed began the division, but the Lutherans have continued it? Are we not exhorted, throughout the whole of Holy Scripture, most earnestly and urgently to love, peace, and unity? How, then, will you Lutherans answer to God for maintaining, still to this day, the three-hundred-year-old disunity among the Protestants, to the offense of others and to the hardening of the papists, and for persisting in the sins of your unloving fathers?

To this we reply: When a division arises through a difference in doctrine,