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

| The Lord’s Supper
or of a bag, ‘Look, you have money’” (LS 51). And he is very modern
and precise when he notes that the “dialecticians do teach that when
two different things are mutually predicated of one another, out of
necessity from the proper and natural meaning of the words, one
must be made into the subject and the other into the attributive or
predicate” (LS 51). He is sensitive to the fact that the contrast between
subject and predicate is a contrast between that part of a sentence
which serves to identify what is being discussed and that part
which seems to describe or characterize the thing so identified and
that one cannot put the subject-predicate relations into any kind of
epistemological straitjacket. This fact may also be why, according
to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, some linguists have proposed as
substitutes for the traditional terms “subject” and “predicate” the
more general terms of “topic” and “comment.” 38 The bread in the
sacrament is the topic, and Christ, the very Son of God in His last
will and testament, has said that this bread is His body. What the
predicate (comment) of the Savior says with regard to the subject
(the topic) is sufficient for Chemnitz to establish the doctrine which
he wants to believe. Not only Chemnitz but also Luther arrived at
the same conviction as modern linguistic scholars do. Luther would
not accept the Sacramentarian contention that “bread must be bread
and cannot be body” (LW 37, 297). He answers, “You should reply: It
is not contrary to Scripture, indeed it is not even contrary to reason
or true logic. They only imagine it is contrary to Scripture, reason,
and logic, for they do not see these in their proper relation to one
another” (LW 37, 297).
157 Chemnitz has an enormous amount of Scriptural material in his
arsenal to prove his point that Scripture employs a special mode of
predication because it is speaking of the infinite God, revealing and
presenting Himself in the finite world. He pretty much covers the
same ground of material, both in The Examination and in The Lord’s
Supper (Ex. 2, 260 f.; LS 50 f.). An examination of some of these examples
shows how Chemnitz regards in the Lord’s Supper. He takes
a striking example from the Old Testament, “When the Ark was
lifted up in Num. 10:35–36, Moses said: ‘Rise up O Lord, and let
your enemies be scattered, and when it was set down he said ‘Return,
O Lord, to the multitude of Israel.’ That is to say, God had promised
his presence with the Ark by the means of a special kind of grace