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

moreover, Christ's body is not naturally broken, but bread is; hence,
instead of illustrating the supernatural by the literal, you are illustrating the
literal by the supernatural. What you want to fit in with your theory is, that
Christ should have said, Take, eat, my body is like this bread; or, the
breaking of my body is like the breaking of this bread. But on this theory
he exactly reverses the statement. He does not say, My body is this; but,
This is my body. Here, too, is one of the sharp and noticeable distinctions
between the thought in John vi. and the thought in the Lord's Supper. In
John vi. he says: “My flesh is bread; my flesh is meat indeed." Here he
says: "This is my body." If it were lawful to supply the word "bread,"
bread would here be the subject, as it is there the predicate. But, whether
bread or the breaking of bread be considered as that with which the body
or breaking of the body is to be compared, it would necessarily, to sustain
the theory of metaphor, or symbol, be the predicate. But it is here
manifestly the subject, as even the great mass of un-Lutheran expositors
are forced to admit. But if bread or breaking of bread be the subject, it is
compared with the body, or breaking of the body: that is, Christ is
supposed to illustrate the natural and familiar action by the remoter and
less intelligible--which is absurd.
Schwenckfeld 408 saw whither this false theory would drive him, to
wit, that it would suppose that our Saviour, considering the eating of his
body as the familiar thing, and the eating of the bread, the thing that
required illustration, which is so manifestly false, that, to avoid it, he
proposed to write the words thus: My body is this bread, to wit, is spiritual
bread, as this is natural bread. If, now, the critic's view could be taken as to
the force of “is," to wit, that it means "is like," he plunges headlong into
the difficulty Schwenckfeld tried in vain to escape. Even if there were a
metaphor, it would not have a parallel in the phrase, "Louis Napoleon is a
fox;" but in this: "A fox is Louis Napoleon;" that is, a fox is like Louis
Napoleon; or, a rock is God; or, grass is flesh; or, a door is Christ.
408 The same view was maintained at a later period by John Lang.