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

Summary and Conclusions |
times” used other phrases such as “under the bread, with the bread,
in the bread, the body of Christ is present and offered” (SD VII,
35). They employed these secondary terms to reject the papistic idea
of transubstantiation and that the sacramental union obtains “apart
from the action which Christ ordained and commanded when He
instituted it.” Chemnitz does, however, recognize that some of the
terminology the Lutherans have employed may be misused by the
Sacramentarians, as when they speak of two things in the Supper.
The adversaries counter that the Eucharist consist of two things but
they are separate. The bread is on earth but the body of Christ is
only in heaven, and hence called a heavenly thing. Formulas other
than Christ’s “This is my body,” lack precision and were used only “at
times.” The Lutherans, it should be noted, together with the Early
Church, use the word “change” to signify what the consecration has
achieved, but they do not mean that the annihilation of the elements
has occurred, but only that after the Verba were spoken the body
and blood of Christ are present (p. 48–53).
418 There is a fundamental similarity between the Reformed and the
Roman position in that they both deny that the finite is capable of the
infinite. They both deny the sacramental union. The Roman Church
states that the “this” (touto) refers to the body of Christ, i.e., “This
body is my body.” The Sacramentarians, on the other hand, insist that
“body” is a metonymic figure of speech so that “body” is the equivalent
of “bread” alone, i.e., “This bread is my bread” (p. 53–55).
419 Some medieval schoolmen, purporting to have borrowed it from
Aristotle, propounded what is called “identical predication,” that is,
that the subject and predicate must be identical, and that “is” means
to be equal in meaning. Besides the Romanists, Zwingli, too, held
that there is no support either in God’s Word or philosophy for such
a concept as “This is bread and moreover it is my body.” The reason
for this, it was held, is that two substances cannot be one thing.
Chemnitz, in harmony with Luther, demonstrates that the subjectpredicate
relationships need not be an identical relationship. Scripture
joins two different entities with the copulative verb “is” which
means nothing else than that there is a union or communion of these
two entities. A case in point are the Biblical statements regarding
Jesus Christ, who is God and Man in one person, “The Son of Man is
the Son of the living God.” Similarly, one can truthfully say that the