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

| The Lord’s Supper
use” (SD VII, 73). The points that Chemnitz and the Gnesio-Lutherans
had been making over against the Philippists are all incorporated
into the Formula. With specific reference to the interpretation
of 1 Cor. 11:23–25 and Luke 22:19 as a mandatum dei given to
the whole church in the New Testament era, the Solid Declaration
confesses that Christ “wants” these words “to be repeated” (SD VII,
75b), and that they are under no circumstances to be omitted because
by repeating them “we render obedience to the command of
Christ, ‘This do’” (SD VII, 79, 80).
216 Chemnitz’s doctrine that the consecration has been given to the
church so that the minister, not on his own authority but on the authority
of Christ, effects the Real Presence through the repetition of
Christ’s words over the elements, is confessed in the Formula through
the quotations from Chrysostom and Luther (SD VII, 76–78).
217 Chemnitz was certainly correct in stating in The Lord’s Supper
that many were disputing the “pure, genuine, and proper meaning”
of Luke 22:19 and 1 Cor. 11:23–25 (LS 108). When the Formula of
Concord appeared it was so severely and publicly attacked that the
Elector commissioned Chemnitz, Selneccer and Kirchner to write
in defense of the document. This is the Apologia written in 1583 and
published with the Elector’s blessing in 1584. As the first, and as an
official commentary which explains the meaning of the Formula,
its importance cannot be overestimated for a better understanding
of what the authors had in mind. In a systematic manner the Apologia
takes up the objections made to the doctrine confessed in the
Formula.
218 Since the Apologia is not readily accessible, the pertinent passages
will be quoted with some completeness: 60
15th — They [i.e., the critics of the Formula] want to make the
Christian Concordia Book as absolutely papist because it teaches that
the elements, bread and wine, must be blessed by means of Christ’s
words, as St. Paul writes in 1 Cor. 10. They scream that we are becoming
regular papists because there is no difference between the papist
consecration and that of our church,
They might, however, have spared themselves such an outcry because
the Christian Concordia deals with the consecration in a different way,
They should have been deeply ashamed to start defaming the Christian
Concordia by attributing to it papist error. But what will not calumny
do? It is the devil’s very own artifice for which he has earned the name
Slanderer.