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

XII.
THE DOCTRINE OF THE LORD'S SUPPER
THETICALLY STATED.
(AUGSBURG CONFESSION. ART. X.)
The Lord’s Supper. I. Old Testament Foreshadows. 1. The
Sacraments in Eden.
IN approaching one of the highest, if not the very highest, of the mysteries
of our faith, it becomes us to prepare ourselves for a most earnest, patient,
and candid investigation of the Scriptural grounds on which that faith rests.
The Lord's Supper has been looked at too much as if it were an isolated
thing, with no antecedents, no presuppositions, no sequences; as if there
were nothing before it, nothing after it, helping to determine its true
character; while, in fact, it links itself with the whole system of Revelation,
with the most vital parts of the Old and New Testament, so that it cannot
be torn from its true connections without logically bringing with it the
whole system. There is no process by which the doctrine of the Lutheran
Church, in regard to the Lord's Supper, can be overthrown, which does not
overthrow the entire fabric of the Atonement. No man can deem our
distinctive doctrine of the Lord's Supper non-fundamental who thoroughly
understands it in all its relations.
The first thing worthy of note in regard to the sacramental mystery is
its antiquity. It meets us at the threshold of the divine history of our race. In
Eden we see already the idea of natural and supernatural eating. We have
there the natural eating terminating in the natural, in the words: "Of every
tree of the Garden thou mayest freely eat." Closely following