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

| The Lord’s Supper
362 A presentation such as this is admittedly attractive, since Luther
and the Reformers also taught a spiritual eating which is to believe
in the Word and promise of God. Such eating, the Formula of Concord
has dogmatically confessed, is “intrinsically useful, salutary, and
necessary to salvation for all Christians at all times” (SD VII, 61). But
what is given up in the Peter Martyr viewpoint is that the consecrated
bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ and are received orally.
If one demurs from such a presentation which the Lutherans make,
namely, that in addition to the spiritual eating there is also an oral
eating, Chemnitz avers that the proponents of the Peter Martyr position
would “immediately let loose with some blasphemous slanders
about Capernaitic eating of the body of Christ, or about the Cyclops
who ate human flesh, or the Scythian slurping of the blood of Christ”
(LS 57). Chemnitz is well aware that the Sacramentarians want to
center everything on “action” in the sacrament, and not on the presence
of the body and blood of Christ (see p. 83, 137 f., and note #80).
There is the constant tendency to spiritualize away what Christ has
declared in His last will and testament, just as Sasse has remarked,
“When Luther’s sacramental realism met with Zwingli’s spiritualizing
humanistic idealism, it was the realism of the Bible which met
with a spiritualizing and rationalistic Christianity which had been a
latent danger to the old Christian faith for centuries.” 83
the three kinds of eating in the sacrament
363 The point of difference, Chemnitz demonstrates lies in the fact that
the Peter Martyr speculation is “unwilling to grant any third kind of
eating between the physical and the spiritual” (LS 57). It represents a
point of view permeated with rationalism, “for human reason neither
knows nor understands any other kind of eating except the physical and
gross eating by which the flesh of cattle is eaten or a cow eats hay” (LS
57). In view of this Chemnitz carefully explains the difference between
the “three-fold eating” that occurs in the Sacrament of the Altar:
First, there is the eating of the bread which is rightly and properly
called a physical eating.
Second, there is the eating of the body of Christ, which although it does
not take place in a physical or gross way, yet (according to the words of Christ)
takes place orally, for He says: “Take, eat; this is my body.” This is called
a sacramental eating in the old method of designation.
Third, there is the spiritual eating of the body of Christ. (LS 58).