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

of natural thinking, to the primary conception of the omnipresence of the
divine. The objectors admit the latter: they thus admit the greater mystery;
yet they blame us for admitting the less. They admit the great fundamental
cause of the mystery, to wit, the inseparable union of the human nature
with the divine personality; and then deny the necessary effect and result of
that cause. When Zwingle, at Marburg, declares that "God does not
propose to our belief things which we cannot comprehend," Melancthon
makes this indignant note: "Such foolish words fell from him, when in fact
the Christian doctrine presents many articles more incomprehensible and
more sublime (than that article of the true presence); as, for example, that
God was made man, that this person Christ, who is true God, died." 524 The
doctrine of the personal omnipresence of the humanity of Christ, at the
point at which it stands in theology, is less difficult to receive than that of
the essential omnipresence of God at the place at which it stands in
theology. To the eye, the senses, reason, experience, Jesus Christ was but a
man. He who can believe, against the apparent evidence of all these, that
the bleeding and dying Nazarene was the everlasting God, ought not to
hesitate, when He affirms it, to believe that what is set before us in the Holy
Supper is more than meets the eye, or offers itself to the grasp of reason.
The interpretation which finds mere bread in the Institution finds logically
mere man in the Institutor. When Jesus sat visibly before Nicodemus, the
palpable and audible Son of man, He said: "The Son of man" (not "the
Son of God") "is in heaven." If that Son of man could be with Nicodemus
in the manner of the lower sphere of His powers, and at the same time in
heaven in the higher sphere, he could be with His disciples at the solemn
testamentary Supper, after both manners, revealing the one to them in the
natural light which flowed from His body, and the other in that truer light
of the higher world of which He is Lord--the light which streams upon the
eye of faith.
V. Philosophy, Modern.
But there is an impression on the minds of many that the wellestablished
results of philosophical thinking in the modern
524 Chytraeus: Hist. Aug. Conf. (Lat.), Frankf., a. M., 1578, 641.