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

the fishy idol, equally with the joyous light which gladdened the High
Priest when he went within the veil, attested it to be the earthly throne of
the Most High. It might as well be said, that because the Romanist does
not discern the bread in the Supper, he receives no bread, as that the
unbeliever, because he does not discern the body of our Lord, does not
commune with it sacramentally. Here is a grand distinctive element in the
Lutheran view, that, apart from all qualities in the recipient, the presence of
Christ's humanity in the Lord's Supper is a positive reality. The
Sacramental communion rests on His person, not on our ideas. To a sick
man, the food he receives may be as poison, but it is none the less food,
with all the powers of nutriment which inhere in food. The reason that it
does not nourish is in him, not in it. So the bread of life, whether offered in
the Word or in the Sacrament, is the same intrinsically, and in its proper
virtue, though unbelief converts that heavenly food to its own poison-changing,
indeed, its effect, but leaving its substance unchanged.
Third Proposition.
3. The communion, according to Dr. Gerhart, with the flesh and
blood of Christ, tales place in the Lord's Supper. But why, we may ask,
limit such a communion as he defines by the Lord's Supper? The bread
and wine are not the medium of it--and, as mere reminders of it, they have
not the power which the Word has. On the Reformed view, the
Sacramental elements have a function limited by their didactic or
suggestive power over us; for, up to this point, the Zwinglian and
Calvinistic views are coincident. If it be answered, that the whole
transaction of the Supper, the Word, and outward signs and special
prayers, has extraordinary power, still it is the same in kind with the other
means of grace, however much it may differ from then in degree. Such a
communion, in a word, as the believer has with Christ, in the Holy
Supper,'through the Holy Spirit, he can have, and does have, on this
theory, elsewhere. If the Lord's Supper has no special organ of
communion, (and if it has the Holy Spirit only, it has no special organ, for
He is the general organ of all grace,) then it has no special character. If the
bread and wine are acknowledged as special organs, the external