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

| The Lord’s Supper
the promise we have in the hope of glorification, is still befouled with
uncleanness, oppressed with misery, and exposed to all the darts of
Satan, the world, and the flesh. As a result our faith is under the Cross
and still terribly tossed about by temptations. Therefore in the Supper
Christ offers us His own body and blood which have been exalted above
all miseries into the glory of the Father. He does this in such a way that
through them He joins Himself to this miserable nature of ours, so that
with this most present and sure guarantee and seal He may give us the
certainty that He does not wish us to remain in these miseries forever
but that some day we shall be conformed to His glorious body which
He offers to us in the Supper as the seal of our own coming glorification.
(LS 191).
The Christology of the Scriptures is never far removed from whatever
part of Scripture Chemnitz is expounding.
390 In the use of the Sacrament all partake of the same body and the
same blood of Christ. In his Brief Confession (1544) Luther had explained
this over against the Sacramentarians, “When you receive the
bread from the altar . . . , you are receiving the same entire body of the
Lord; the person who comes after you also receives the same entire
body, as does the third, and the thousandth after the thousandth one
for ever and ever” (LW 38, 292). The same fact applies to the blood of
Christ, “You are drinking His entire blood; so, too, does the one who
follows you even to the thousand times the thousandth one, as the
words of Christ clearly say: “Take eat, this is my body’ [Matt. 26:26]”
(LW 38, 292). Luther sums it all up by quoting from the hymn of
Thomas Aquinas (Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem), “One takes it, a thousand
take it; this person receiving as much as that person; nor having taken
it, is it consumed” (LW 38, 293).
391 Chemnitz’s entire presentation of the sacrament and its benefits
proceeds from this basic concept, “For in the Supper I do not receive a
particular body and you a different one, but we all receive the one and
the same body of Christ . . . .” (LS 143). The result is that through the
bread we are united with Christ, “For through the bread we are united
with the body of Christ, and through the body with Christ Himself,
and through Christ with the Father. Thus we are made partakers (koinonoi)
with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These things are
the results of the salutary communion (koinonia) of the body and the
blood of the Lord in the Supper” (LS 143).
392 The tremendous importance of the doctrine of the personal union
of the two natures of Christ and all that it implies for the revelation