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

| The Lord’s Supper
146 Chemnitz answers in the terms of Irenaeus, “I answer: We grant
with Irenaeus that after the blessing in the Eucharist the bread is no
longer common bread but the Eucharist of the body of Christ which
now consists of two things — the earthly, that is, the bread and the
wine, and the heavenly, that is, the body and blood of Christ.” Chemnitz
agrees that this is a “divine change,” but he will not grant that
“therefore transubstantiation takes place” (Ex 2, 258). This “change”
can occur so that it is true as Irenaeus held, that the Eucharist consists
of two things — an earthly and a heavenly one. “The presence,
offering and receiving of His body and blood can be taught, believed,
and held even if the monstrosity of transubstantiation is not foisted
upon the churches without the testimony of Scripture and without
the consensus of antiquity” (Ex 2, 258).
147 All this leads to the third argument which, as Chemnitz says,
is the crowning one, namely, that “they themselves confess that if
transubstantiation is not proved certainly and clearly by this, it
cannot be proved from Scripture” (Ex 2, 258). The argument “runs
as follows”:
1. If in the Eucharist the substance of bread and wine remain together with
the body and blood of Christ, He would have said,“This is bread; this is
wine; and with them, in them, or under them my body and blood.”
2. But what He does say is,“This is my body; this is my blood.”
3. If “this” (touto) denotes the substance of the bread and the wine (because
bread and the body of Christ and wine and blood, are two different
things), then the one cannot be predicated of the other.
4. “Therefore, in order that the declaration, ‘This is my body; this is my
blood’ may be true, there must be posited in these words an identical
proposition, which is the term one uses when the subject and predicate
speak about one and the same thing so that the demonstrative pronoun
[“this”] denotes not the substance of bread but the substance of the
body of Christ only. But such a positing cannot stand unless the
substance of the bread which Christ took into His hands has ceased to
exist, having been annihilated through the benediction, and has been
transubstantiated, so that nothing else is meant and indicated there by
the little word‘this’ than the substance of the body of Christ only” (Ex 2,
259; emphasis added).
148 In other words, Christ said, “This [body] is my body.” But Chemnitz
has demonstrated exegetically that touto refers to the earthly
elements (see p. 45 ff.). Paralleling this, he has also demonstrated
against the Sacramentarians, that “is” explains what is present and