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

ead of life which has come from heaven is the divine personality of Jesus
Christ. To eat this bread can have no other meaning than to appropriate
Jesus in faith. Now, as Jesus attaches to the eating of His flesh and the
drinking of His blood the same operations which are attributed to faith (v.
47) and to the eating of the bread of heaven (v. 50, 51), namely, eternal life,
the eating of the flesh of Christ cannot be, specifically, anything else than
the eating of the bread from heaven, that is, the faith which unites with
Christ. The flesh of Christ, which He gives for the life of the world, is His
body, which is to be given in death, that is, is His death. Eating the flesh
and drinking the blood can, consequently, only mean the receiving in us,
in faith, Jesus as the Crucified for us. This is the condition of salvation, of
living fellowship with Christ, of everlasting life, of the resurrection. He who
receives in himself Jesus Christ in His body and blood given to death,
receives, in this bodily nature, slain for us, the life of Jesus Christ, which
fills him with the powers of eternity. The unity of this proposition lies,
beyond doubt, in this, that the power of the slain bodily nature of Christ is
absorbed into the glorified bodily nature of Christ; so that he who grasps
the sacrificed bodily nature of Christ with its propitiatory power, together
with the glorified corporeal nature, is filled, by it, with the entire person of
Christ. The discourse in John vi. does not, primarily, treat of the Supper,
but of that faith which establishes a living fellowship between us and
Christ. But Christ, beyond doubt, designedly veiled the faith under the
image of an eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood, in order to
express the mystical thought which subsequently was to be transferred to
the body in the Supper, just as in John iii. 5, He expressed the idea of
Baptism. For the history of the exposition, see Abendm. 114 seq. It is now
alone that we come to understand why Jesus calls bread and wine not
merely signs of His death, but of His body and blood, which are to be
given to death. Inasmuch as Christ designates His death as a suffering
which is to be endured by His body, His blood, He means to express the
thought that just as little as broken bread ceases to be bread, and wine
poured out ceases to