ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN CONFESSIONS LC2 36 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 800 825 5234 www.captionfirst.com *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> JOSH: Well, as long as we're moving on to the sacrament of the Eucharist, let me ask the same questions we asked of baptism. Why did Luther view the Lord's Supper as so critically important? >> DR. KOLB: I'm sorry, Josh, but I don't say "Eucharist" all that much. I know a lot of pastors in our circles do. Eucharist comes from the Greek word which means to give thanks. And, if we see the sacrament of the altar, the Lord's Supper as something that God does, then I'm not sure to whom he's giving thanks. I don't want you to abandon using that term. But it has some theological ambiguity. And I think it does not hurt for us to be aware of that. Although even in 16th century Lutheranism, but certainly outside our circles, that's a frequently used term. In the 16th century, in the 15th and 14th and 13th centuries in Europe where people could not read or write, where many priests could not read and write and had not formally studied theology but had simply learned in an apprenticeship in maybe the neighboring village or his own village to say the mass and the like, the word of God came, first of all, and most frequently and most prominently in the form of the sacrament of the altar. And so the piety of medieval Europe was well, it was centered around a number of things, prayers to the saints and so forth, too. But also around that magic moment, as the people saw it. That magic moment when God's presence came in the special way in the celebration of a mass to their village. And so, because that had formed the center of piety and attendance of the mass had been perhaps the most important good work they could do, the most important, they thought, God pleasing work they could do, the Lord's Supper was a special kind of thing. And so it was just natural for Luther, when he tried to reach people where they were, to emphasize the Lord's Supper. That wasn't merely a communications device, however, for Luther. He certainly believed that the gift of the body and blood of Christ for us was one of the most wonderful, thrilling gifts God could give. And so, because the word of God was the very center of his understanding of the Christian life, because God's address to us with the forgiveness of sins and life and salvation was that agency of God that created the trust that forms the relationship we have with him, for those reasons the Lord's Supper was particularly important for him because the Lord's Supper brought the word of God, that word of life and salvation to the people in a particularly dramatic way.