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

| The Lord’s Supper
What Aristotle is alleged to have believed and taught is that such statements as“Water
is wet” and “Dewey is a philosopher” mean that water is identical with wetness, and
Dewey is identical with the characteristic of being a philosopher . . . .
It is worth noting that Korzybski gives no quotation from Aristotle to support this
charge. And it should be said, as a matter of historical justice, that there is no evidence
that Aristotle or his followers believed anything so absurd. One sufficient reason is
that the view with which they are charged would be inconsistent with the standard
syllogistic doctrine of the impossibility of converting universal propositions. If the “is”
in“Water is wet” were the“is” of identity, as alleged, the truth of that proposition would
automatically entail the truth of the converse proposition that all wetness is water. Now
it is, of course, a central part of the doctrine of Aristotelian logic that the proposition All
A is B cannot be automatically replaced by the converse, All B is A. Again, if Aristotle
believed the absurd doctrine which is ascribed to him, he would have to believe that
Plato and Socrates and Aristotle himself were all the same person. For, if all of them
were identical with being a philosopher, all of them must be identical with one another.
Even a stupid man would hardly believe in these absurd consequences; and Aristotle
was very far from being stupid. (Quoted by William H. Youngren,“General Semantics
and Science of Meaning,” College English, Jan. 1968, p. 263). The Max Black quotation is
from his “Korzybski’s General Semantics” in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, 1949, p.
230).
36. Possibly the key to a more precise understanding of this Chemnitz reference can be found
in J. R. Weinberg, A Short History of Medieval Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1968, p. 54, Note #1:
In addition to the doctrine of Categories, i.e., the classification of different kinds of
being or of “things said in an uncombined way” —namely, substance, quantity, quality,
relation, place, time, situation, condition, action, and passion—Aristotle has a doctrine
about the ways in which terms occur in the predicates of statements. Aristotle’s own
classification of these ways of predication was: definition, genus, property, and accident.
This means that the predicate of a statement can stand to its subject as being either the
definition of the subject (e.g., a triangle is a plane figure bounded by three straight lines),
or its genus (e.g., a triangle is a plane figure), or a property of the subject (e.g., a triangle
has two right angles as sum of its interior angles), or an accident of the subject (e.g., some
triangle is five inches on one side).
It would seem that many Biblical statements could be classified according to this paradigm,
even if one has made only a cursory examination; Chemnitz is right that Scripture has
many examples of these kinds of predicate statements.
37. Chemnitz uses virtually the same language in LS 51.
38. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, editor-in-chief, N.Y.: The Macmillan and the
Free Press, 1967, 8, 33.
39. See LW 40, 197, Against the Heavenly Prophets.
40. See LW 37, 301 f., Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper.
41. The New International Version, which has become so popular among us, translates this
passage exactly as the adversaries of Chemnitz did, “He must remain in heaven until the
time comes for God to restore everything” (emphasis added). The Living New Testament,
many copies of which are found among our people because of Billy Graham’s advocacy of it,
perpetuates the same Reformed error,“For he must remain in heaven until the final recovery
of all things” (emphasis added). The New King James Version and the New American
Standard follow the original King James,“Whom heaven must receive.”