The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

implies. Bold and uncompromising as our Confessors and Theologians
have been, if the word Consubstantiation (which is not a more human term
than Trinity and Original Sin are human terms,) had expressed correctly
their doctrine, they would not have hesitated to use it. It is not used in any
Confession of our Church, and we have never seen it used in any standard
dogmatician of our communion, except to condemn the term, and to
repudiate the idea that our Church held the doctrine it involves. We might
adduce many of the leading evidences on this point; but for the present, we
will refer to but a few. Bucer, in his Letter to Comander, confesses that "he
had done injustice to Luther, in imputing to him the doctrine of
Impanation," and became a defender of the doctrine he had once rejected.
Gerhard, that monarch among our theologians, says: "To meet the
calumnies of opponents, we would remark, that we neither believe in
Impanation nor Consubstantiation, nor in any physical or local presence
whatsoever. Nor do we believe in that consubstantiative presence which
some define to be the inclusion of one substance in another. Far from us
be that figment. The heavenly thing and the earthly thing, in the Holy
Supper, in the physical and natural sense, are not present with one
another." Baier, among our older divines, has written a dissertation
expressly to refute this calumny, and to show, as Cotta expresses it, "that
our theologians are entirely free from it (penitus abhorrere.)" Cotta, in his
note on Gerhard, says: "The word Consubstantiation may be understood
in different senses. Sometimes it denotes a local conjunction of two bodies,
sometimes a commingling of them, as, for example, when it is alleged that
the bread coalesces with the body, and the wine with the blood, into one
substance. But in neither sense can that MONSTROUS DOCTRINE OF
CONSUBSTANTIATION be attributed to our Church, since Lutherans
do not believe either in that local conjunction of two bodies, nor in any
commingling of bread and of Christ's body, of wine and of His blood." To
pass from great theologians to a man of the highest eminence in the
philosophical and scientific world, LEIBNITZ, in his Discourse on the
Conformity of Reason with Faith, says: "Evangelical (Lutherans) do not
approve of the