The Lord's Supper in the Theology of Martin Chemnitz Bjarne - Logia

The Consecration |
so that the communicants eat and drink the body and blood of Christ
for the forgiveness of sins. This is also the position of Chemnitz (see
p. 72, 74 ff., esp. 76).
213 It may be helpful here to summarize what Chemnitz teaches with
respect to the consecration. His doctrine is that bread and wine in
the prescribed “use” of the sacrament are after the consecration the
body and blood of Christ. This must be true, for the Savior himself
says that it is His true body and blood. The church today has that
assurance because Christ “by this repetition to Paul [1 Cor, 11:23–25]
wanted to explain whatever might seem to have been stated too briefly,
obscurely, or ambiguously in the words He had used in the Upper
Room” (LS 107). Chemnitz grants that from the words of Matthew
and Mark “one might not be able to determine clearly and with certainty
whether this command concerning the Lord’s Supper was only
a personal one pertaining only to the Apostles at that time, as the
command to Peter by which he was ordered to walk on the waves.”
Chemnitz concludes, however, that it “was a universal command pertaining
to the whole church and to the whole period of the New Testament,
“because” Christ in this repetition to Paul adds these words:
‘This do in remembrance of me’” (LS 107 f,),
214 Chemnitz, after carefully examining “the testimony of two witnesses,
Paul and Luke,” declares that if one “departs from these repetitions
and seeks another point of view, [he] is surely both ungrateful
and contemptuous in the face of such exacting care and fatherly concern
on the part of the only-begotten Son of God, our Teacher, who
alone can open the closed book and read it [Rev. 5:5]” (LS 107). For
Chemnitz the understanding of 1 Cor. 11:23–25 and Luke 22:19 is not
a mere private opinion on which one could differ. Speaking of Paul’s
testimony in 1 Corinthians, he confesses that “there is no doubt that
in this repetition after His ascension He is giving us the sure, genuine,
and proper meaning of those words which are now called into
such sharp controversy” (LS 108).
215 That even among the Lutherans after Luther’s death there was
controversy about the significance of the consecration as effecting
the Real Presence, is evident from the Formula. It admits that there
had “arisen a misunderstanding and dissension among the teachers
of the Augsburg Confession concerning the consecration and the
common rule that there is no sacrament apart from the instituted