Full Text for Confessions 2- Volume 37 - What Does the Supper Do for Us? (Video)

ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN CONFESSIONS LC2 37 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. *** >> STUDENT: Jesus says in the upper room with his disciples, "Do this in remembrance of me." Now I know that he institutes the supper to accomplish far more than a simple memorializing of himself. I know that it is a efficacious act. But would you describe this for us? What does the Lord's Supper do for us? Why do we do this in remembrance of him? >> DR. KOLB: Sometimes Lutherans have kind of ignored that "in remembrance of him." I suppose partly in reaction to those who thought of the Lord's Supper as simply a memorial meal, no more than a remembrance of him. But in remembering what he gives us or what he gave us as he gave us his body and blood for the first time, with the disciples, we remember the Gospel itself. To remember here is to be listening to the proclamation of the Gospel. Probably we should get a little background to what the holy supper does for us and what it is. So let's look at the text in the small catechism again as our guide and try to answer its questions within the historical context. The question that gets the most attention in many of our discussions of the Lord's Supper is the first, what is it? Luther's answer is very direct, quite simple. It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine instituted by Christ himself for us Christians to eat and to drink. And then Luther quotes the words of institution in a version in which he brings together the account of the three synoptic evangelists and St. Paul in 1 Corinthians. It is the true body and blood. We speak of the real presence of Christ's body and blood. The 16th century reformers generally didn't use the phrase "real presence." They used the phrase "true presence" of Christ's body and blood. There's probably no language that can avoid several interpretations. Some would argue that "real presence" can be used by Calvinists who believe in a real spiritual presence of Jesus even though they don't believe that it's possible for his body and blood to be present. And the same thing I suppose could be said of the word "true." Calvin's most important disciple, Theodor Beza, talked about the true presence of Jesus Christ, not of his body and blood. It's an important distinction to note. Calvin and some Calvinists talk about the real or the true presence of Christ, but in a spiritual way. They avoid the language of true presence of his body and blood. But Luther insisted that indeed the sacrament gives us the very body and blood of Jesus Christ and gives it to us in a mysterious or what he called a sacramental way that we can't explain in terms of modern physics. Luther, Zwingli, Calvin all three rejected the attempt by the medieval church in the doctrine of transsubstantiation to explain how the physics of the Lord's Supper works. In order to defend the biblical message that Christ gives us his true body and blood in the Lord's Supper, the medieval church took from Aristotle's physics a theory of how things are composed. Instead of talking about atoms and protons and neutrons and electrons, Aristotle said that everything is composed of a substance which is the invisible form or the essence, the thing that makes this table, for instance, a table. And then each individual instance in which this substance is present has its own specific characteristics, and they were called accidents. And so this table has the accident of being made out of wood rather than out of metal or plastic, has the accident of having four legs rather than six or three. So, in taking that theory from the physics of the day, medieval church taught that the substance of bread and the substance of wine are replaced by the substance of Christ's body and the substance of Christ's blood even though the external accidents of bread and wine remain. So it still looks like bread and wine. But underneath the substance, according to Aristotle, is truly Christ's body and blood. Luther rejected that not because the doctrine in itself technically was wrong but because the explanation, the attempt to explain this great mystery of God offended him. He thought that was making human reason too powerful. He used human reason a great deal. But he thought that in this case human reason was asserting itself claiming more power for itself than it had any right to. That's why you may hear some Lutherans say well, we don't believe in transsubstantiation. We believe in consubstantiation. But that's not true at all. There were a few medieval theologians who believed that the substance of bread and the substance of body, the substance of wine and the substance of blood come together under the accidents of bread and wine. But Luther did not hold that view because it has the same problem as transsubstantiation. It has the problem of trying to explain what God leaves a mystery without explanation. He tells us what the sacrament is, but he does not tell us the way in which the physics of the matter works. Well, on the other hand, on the other side of Luther, I suppose we could say, someone like Ulrich Zwingli rejected transsubstantiation and went to the other extreme to say Christ's body and blood are not present at all. Christ is not present at all. Although the Zwingli scholar, Fritz Busser, retired some 10 years ago from his post as a Reformation historian at the University of Zurich, demonstrated that in the year before his death, Zwingli began to say well yes, Christ is present, but he's present only in a spiritual way. That was the view of John Calvin who thought that when our bodies, our mouths, let's say, receive Christ's body and receive the bread and the wine, our souls mount up to heaven and in faith in heaven receive the spiritually present Christ. That view comes closer to Lutheran language. But it still denies an essential Lutheran presupposition. As the debate between Lutherans and Calvinists went on, they began to say the Calvinists, for instance that the finite, that is, something created, could not bury, could not bear could not deliver the infant. In other words, bread and wine, even Christ's body and blood, couldn't really actually bestow and give us the benefits of Christ. That's a spiritual transaction. Calvin, like Zwingli, had been influenced by Platonism and neoPlatonism which drew a sharp divide between the material and the spiritual. The Bible doesn't draw a sharp divide between the material and spiritual. Makes that distinction to be sure. But the sharp divide in the Bible is between the creator and the creature. So that's why, indeed, the second person the Holy Trinity can become a human being. But no human being, obviously, can become God. And so the Calvinists and the Zwinglians, who finally historically came together in the Consensus of Zurich, the Swiss town, in 1549, they argue that while Christ might be present, he is not present in any tangible, tastable way. We don't actually receive his body and blood. We simply receive his benefits through his spiritual presence. Luther had a different philosophical basis for the way he thought about these things. You remember that we talked about his Ocamist instructors who assured him that in God's absolute power, God could create any kind of world he wanted to. And so for Luther to say the almighty God can create a world in which he can convey his body and blood and with that body and blood the very forgiveness of sins, that's not impossible at all. God could have arranged it that way. He could have made the sacrament of the altar a very special instance of his presence, quite different from other ways in which he is present as the almighty creator or as the Lord of the church. And so Luther believed that the God who had become a human being, whose human nature and divine nature actually share characteristics, that is, share the characteristic of being able to be in different places in different forms or modes or ways, that that God could certainly have arranged to be present as the Lord of the universe, governing the way in which the rivers flow and the planets circle. At the same time he can be present as the Lord of the church in the proclamation of the word, for instance, and then in a different mode be present with his body and blood which he had assumed in the incarnation in order to in a very special way bring that word of life and salvation, word of forgiveness of sins to people. Well, we've moved, you recognize, we've moved now from what the sacrament is to what it does. So let's look again at the text of the small catechism. What is the benefit? What does it do? And Luther emphasizes those words "given for you, shed for you. And for the forgiveness of sins." The forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation in this text, I think, are not three different things, three different stages of blessing or benefit from the death and resurrection of Christ. The forgiveness of sins takes away what makes us dead in trespasses and sin. So we are once alive by the resurrection of Christ, alive and enjoying the life and the salvation that he gives. And so that really sums up what Luther thought the sacrament does. In other writings he also stresses that it brings us together in a community. He stresses that it's a kind of dress rehearsal for the eschatological banquet at the end of time. That's also an important element. But above all, he stressed that the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation that we receive from preaching, from absolution, from our conversation with other Christians, that was given to us decisively once and for all in our baptism is renewed and given to us as we receive the Lord's body and blood. How is that possible? Well, once again, Luther did not want anything to do with the magical views of the Lord's Supper that were current in the late Middle Ages. No, he tells us very clearly that just eating and drinking bread and wine can't do it. What brings us life and salvation is the very fact that God has placed his word with this bread/body and this wine/blood. The words "given for you, shed for you," the words of the Gospel with the bread and wine that are the body and blood, that's what gives us the forgiveness of sins. So then Luther comes to his last question. Let's get down to earth now. Who can receive this sacrament worthily? In the Middle Ages Christians often used fasting and other kinds of special physical bodily preparations to make themselves feel worthy to receive the Lord's Supper. Luther says well, that's an external discipline. That's not harmful to do that so long as you don't put any faith in your own fasting as a source of your merit, your worthiness in God's sight. No, what you need to receive the Lord's Supper is simply faith. Faith that, when Christ said that this body and this blood are given for you are shed for you, that he meant you, that he means to take your sins away as you receive the Lord's Supper. That's what makes you worthy and welcome there. Without that faith, then the sacrament does you no good at all. You receive it to your condemnation. Just as you can hear a sermon to your condemnation. You receive it without being able to reap the benefits that come from what Christ has done for you. So the Lord's Supper is really in some ways indeed very important and maybe not exactly always the heart of Luther's piety. But, as a form of the word of God, it is part of that agency of God, that instrument of God that changes human life, that buries us as sinners to use the baptismal analogy and raises us up, that then feeds us along our path with preaching and absolution and Christian conversation and with the supper of the Lord in which he gives us himself, body and blood, so that we may belong to him. S