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

never forget that “the dogma of the Lord’s Supper did not exist in the
church before its institution, and only on the night in which Christ
was betrayed was the Lord’s Supper dealt with for the first time with a
definite form of institution, with definite words in the actual last will
and testament of the Son of God” (LS 34).
48 Today there are efforts to try to connect the Lord’s Supper with
the Passover Feast so as to show it chiefly as being a religious fellowship
meal. Attempts have been made to reconstruct some kind of
Eucharistic prayer for modern liturgical forms from prayers used at
the Passover meals at the time of Christ. Chemnitz, however, draws
a sharp line between the Lord’s Supper and any other meal. In examining
Luke 22 he concludes that Christ “through Luke wants to have
it [i.e., the order of events of the Last Supper] so precisely described
that His dominical Supper of the New Testament is by the very order
of the events distinguished from all other suppers, whether secular
ones, observed by the necessity of nature, or sacred, typical, and
symbolic ones, such as the eating of the Passover Lamb as prescribed
in the Old Testament” (LS 110).
the verba constitute christ’s
Last Will and testament
The Biblical Foundation |
49 That the words of Christ are his last will and testament are of extreme
importance to Chemnitz, because this points to the fact that
we must interpret these words literally. This is a hermeneutical principle
recognized even in the secular world, “When the last will and
testament of a man has been, executed we are required under the law
to observe the words with special care so that nothing be done which
is either beside or contrary to the final will of the testator. Even the
civil laws regard such a will as so sacred that they have determined
that those who have made any profit at all from the will for themselves
shall be deprived of it, and their inheritance through the provisions
of the laws themselves shall be taken away from them as being unworthy,
on the grounds that they have departed from the will of the
testator as it is stipulated in the words of the testament” (LS 27).
50 If this is the case in the reading of human wills, how much more
important is it that “we should give very careful thought that we do
not thrust anything upon these words of the last will and testament
of the Son of God, lest we deprive ourselves of the benefits of eternal