ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONFESSIONS 1 CON1-Q036 JANUARY 2005 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 LOMBARD, IL 60148 * * * * * This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communications Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. * * * * >> JOSHUA: Why do the sacraments play such a prominent role in the Augsburg Confession? >> DR. KLAUS DETLEV SHULTZ: Well, Joshua, here our attention is drawn to Articles 9 through 13. We are told that the sacraments in Article 13 are the means to awaken and strengthen faith in those who hear the Gospel. This means that the sacraments are those efficacious means that bring the salvation to those who believe. We can see that in Article 9 on baptism, therefore, it is described as necessary. Our fathers, in the Augsburg Confession, do not yet draw the distinction between whether it is an ordained necessary or absolutely necessary. We want to stay firm on the position that the sacrament of baptism is required because the Lord commanded it. And as long as that is the case, we are also commanded to baptize everyone, including infants, as the article expressly states. We then proceed to Article 10 concerning the Lord's Supper. Melanchthon writes here that Christ's body and blood are truly present in the Lord's Supper and distributed to those who eat the Lord's Supper. Thereby Melanchthon takes the position of real presence; namely, that Christ's body and blood are truly president at Holy Communion. We may miss, perhaps, the formula that Luther uses in the Small Catechism of saying that Christ�s body and blood is present in an under bread and wine; namely, with the elements distributed to those who eat them and drank it. Melanchthon has always said, to a certain degree, that there is a latitude in Holy. Communion. That means that he is willing to confine himself to the right of Holy Communion, to the liturgical right. That means as long as there are people gathered around the altar that there the presence of Christ is to be located. Luther went a little further by saying, Christ's body and blood is truly present in and with and under those elements. I do think, however, that Melanchthon is trying not to detract our attention away from a local presence in Holy Communion. That is, a bodily presence of Christ's body and blood. The Article 10 is talking against the backdrop of two false positions. On the one side, we have the Zwinglian position. We may recall the *Marburg Articles, especially Article 15 where both Luther and Zwingli disagreed on the presence of Christ. Zwingli said that he cannot agree with Luther's understanding that Christ's body and blood is truly present. He believed that there is a locality to be appended to Jesus' body. That means sitting at the right hand of God would mean that Christ's body is present there and in no other place. Whereas, Luther was quite willing to say, if the word says this is my body, then it must also be said that Christ is bodily present, his human presence is also there at Holy Communion. Melanchthon and Luther agreed on this, I believe, against the Zwinglian position that the Holy Communion is only a memorial act. In the *Fideratio, Zwingli says this, that the Holy Spirit needs no vehicle. He does not have to come to us via something as the word. That would inhibit the sovereignty of God and His grace. So Melanchthon really understood the Holy Communion contrary to Zwingli's position, taking that the Holy Communion is the actual means of delivering God's grace. Zwingli would say that that is not necessary. Zwingli uses the example of the wedding band. That means that a husband will leave the wedding band behind for his wife to serve her as a reminder of their marriage. So, also, Zwingli would say that Jesus Christ left his church with the sacraments to serve as a reminder, but not as a vehicle to bring the grace, but rather to affirm and to confirm that grace that has been given to us. So in effect, Zwingli is taking a position almost like the Anabaptists. And he, too, must be termed as an enthusiast denying the visible means as those that bring the grace and the forgiveness to us. Another position against which our article speaks, implicitly I must say, is that of the Roman Catholic understanding of transubstantiation. What do we mean by transubstantiation? That is a philosophical term and really goes back to the *Aristotelian distinction between substance and accidents. What the Roman Catholics have always believed is that the bread and wine transforms into Christ's body and blood. That means what remains behind is bread and wine, but only in accidents. That means that we really have the substance of Christ�s body and body, and no longer like Luther would say, together with or in with and under so that Luther would not really agree with the transubstantiation. It was a philosophical term that he rejected. So also did Luther reject the understanding of consubstantiation meaning thereby, when the word comes together with the elements that thereby, a third thing would arise out of it. But rather, we have to accept, as Melanchthon says in Article 10, we have four things really present: the bread and the wine, and we also have Christ's body and blood. How such sacramental union occurs explicitly, or how it should be explained, is something that we cannot do. It is really a mystery, but we are bound to God's word, as Luther would say, according to the institution of Jesus Christ when he says this is my body and this is my blood, we should take that seriously and as a word that is binding ourselves to the concept of Christ's bodily presence in Holy Communion. We then move on to a number of articles that relate to confession and repentance. That is Article 11 and Article 12. I've spoken already about 11 on the confession because previously I have said that the enumeration of sins is not necessary. Rather that confession is to be kept and maintained in the church as a proper means of relating oneself to the law, and that one is a sinful person and always in need of forgiveness, making confession, private confession, still a necessary component in the life of the church. Article 12 speaks on repentance. Here, the reformers, Melanchthon, draws a distinction between two components in the doctrine of repentance. It means he wants to say on the one side, repentance requires contrition, true contrition. In fact, Luther says at one time in the *(inaudible) Articles, contrition is a passive recognition of one's sins laid about through the preaching of the law and brought about by the Holy Spirit. The other component in repentance would be that of faith, again, that, too, would be brought to us by the Holy Spirit. The problem with the Roman Catholic understanding of penance is that it demanded from each believer three components. The first was that one would confess one's sin and would enumerate all those that plagued one. And only upon that enumeration would one then be pardoned by the priest. However, such pardon, such forgiveness would be spoken to the individual on the condition that satisfaction would be made. So the third component, really, is one that bothered the reformers the most. Because satisfaction, doing that, really detracts, again, from the person of Jesus Christ and the merits that He achieved on the cross. So, really, the doctrine of pregnancy, as the Lutherans speak of, wants to highlight one very important fact: That in this life, perfection cannot be obtained. It is demanded of us that we repent every day. That highlights the significance of baptism in and our life, as I have already said before. We should repent and come to faith every day of our life because there is nothing like cheap grace, and there is also no concept of us being perfect throughout our entire life but rather, because of our proclivity to sin, we'll be drawn back into sinfulness. And for this reason, the doctrine of penance is absolutely crucial for the life of the church. How many sacraments do we have, we may ask, after we have looked at all these various four; baptism, Holy Communion, confession, and the doctrine of penance. Well, the Roman Catholics had seven sacraments altogether. And the Augsburg confession does not yet come down to explicitly naming how many sacraments we do have. However, I believe that coming back to the Augsburg Confession from the theology of the orthodoxy, and later on also what is being said in the Apology Article 13, that we could single out baptism and Holy Communion of being really the true sacraments of the church. Because there are three criteria that we may apply. The one is that it must be instituted by Christ. The other must be that it must have the promise of grace and forgiveness. And the third component is that it must have an element. These three components are absolutely crucial, and once we look at the various sacraments of the church, we can see that only two really qualify for our definition or what is a sacrament. However, I want to make a point here that absolution, pronouncing the forgiveness of sins at the joint confession in church, is also a means of grace of delivering that forgiveness to those who are gathered there and who believe in the Gospel as the true delivering -- as the true means of delivering that forgiveness. So for the sake of being precise here, and of any notions of drawing into the definition of what a sacrament is, other means of grace, we would want to say that we want to confine ourselves to both baptism and Holy Communion, but see also, at the same time, the gifts and benefits that we gain from the doctrine of absolution and its practice in the church.