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

| The Lord’s Supper
peculiar mode of presence and grace in the action of His Supper, so that
He truly and substantially imparts His body and blood to those who
eat, . . . if, I say, we truly and from the heart believe these things, it neither
can nor should happen that faith would fail to venerate and worship
Christ who is present in this action” (Ex 2, 277; emphasis added).
Here it is of the utmost importance to remember Chemnitz’s “precising
definition” of the term “action” with respect to his use of it in the
Lord’s Supper (see p. 13 f.).
108 It is now necessary to examine the fifth kind of presence to which
Chemnitz makes reference, “He has all creatures present with him
en logoo” (TNC 449; see endnote #20). This would be identical with
the repletive mode, “according to which all creatures are indeed much
more penetrable and present to him than they are according to the
second mode.” This must be so because Christ is “one person with
God” (SD VII, 101). The Formula anchors this conviction even more
firmly in Article VIII, employing part of Luther’s Great Confession,
“Since He is a man like this — and apart from this man there is no
God — it must follow that according to the third supernatural manner,
He is and can be everywhere that God is and that everything is
full of Christ through and through, also according to the humanity
— not, of course, according to the first, corporeal, comprehensible
manner, but according to the supernatural, divine manner. Here you
must take your stand and say that wherever Christ is according to
the deity, He is there as a natural, divine person and also naturally
and personally there as His conception in His mother’s womb proves
conclusively” (SD VIII, 81 f.; LW 37, 218).
109 This is precisely the doctrine of Chemnitz. In devoting a preliminary
chapter to the definition of the Personal Union, he says that
this intimate uniting of the assuming and the assumed natures brings
about the fact that although as a result of this union nothing in itself is
added to or subtracted from the divine nature, yet in the human nature
of Christ, because of the union, there are not only natural attributes
which result from the constitution of human nature, nor are there only
particular and finite which inhere formally in the humanity and are more
numerous and more excellent in degree than those which come from
the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the saints, but also because of this
union the human nature in Christ not only has the fulness of the deity
dwelling in it personally, but at the same time, according to the Scripture,
it receives the divine majesty which has been given and communicated to
it along with the divine power, wisdom, life and other divine qualities.