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

e wine, just as little does that dissolution destroy the substance of His
body. He does not give us His death to eat, but His body. The bread
signifies Christ's body, the breaking of the bread the killing of the body,
the eating' of the bread the appropriation of the slain body in faith. The
Christian who grasps the slain body of Christ in faith, appropriates to
himself the death of Christ, and the body of Christ also, as he who eats of
the broken bread makes use of the breaking that he may receive into him
the bread. He who eats the broken bread commutes it into his organism,
consequently into his life. He who, in faith, grasps the slain body of Jesus
Christ makes it living by receiving into himself its vital power, that is, its
power of atonement. If, now, that which the body of Christ suffered in
death inheres in the glorified body, then he who receives the atoning
power immanent in the glorified body receives into himself the glorified
body itself, and in and with it the whole Christ. This is the truth which lies
in the Lutheran exposition of the words of institution. We cannot grasp the
slain body in faith without receiving the glorified body into us, because the
virtue of the slain body lies in the glorified body. This reception is, it is
true, no eating and drinking, but a spiritual reception by faith as a medium.
The Lord's Supper is a spiritual eating and drinking (1 Cor. x. 3, 4, 12, 13.
See Abendm. 145, seq.) He who, in faith, receives Christ's body and blood,
receives the whole Christ into himself (John vi. 59), which can take place
in no other than a spiritual manner. As, finally, the feast of the Passover
was a feast of fellowship in which the people of Israel were contemplated
as one great family of God (Dogm. I. 263), so is the Lord's Supper a feast
of fellowship in which they who eat of the one bread are one body (1 Cor.
x. 17)." Such, without abridgment, is Kahnis' own statement of his new faith,
and of the argument for it. The feebleness, vacillation, and selfcontradiction
involved in it are beyond expression. At some point or other
it exhibits the characteristic weakness of almost every false view which has
ever been taken of the Supper. It is artificial, and yet not artistic; it is
confused rather than complicated; for with all its elaboration it is not
difficult to disentangle it. It wears the air of a self-tormented rationalism