ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 48 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** 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. *** >> Thank you. Let me follow up with this: Is Jesus present in the Lord's Supper in the same way he was present before he was crucified? Or did the nature of his presence change? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: You know, you asked your question in a very simple and easy way to answer. And of course, the answer is he's not present in the same way. But in your question, there is something more profound going on. Just two weeks ago I read the encounter that one of our Lutheran pastors and professors in Canada had with ministers and clergymen of other denominations and asked about how was Jesus present in the Lord's Supper. And one said, "Well, of course he's present because he's present in all things. Just like he is present in your breakfast cereal and so forth. So I accept the real presence." Other people said, "Well he's only present there by way of remembrance." Others say he's not present there himself but he's present insofar as the Holy Ghost makes him alive. Now, all of these things are going to be found in the discussion that you're going to hear on the Lord's Supper. And this is not the time for us to discuss that. But what we can discuss -- and this is what your question brings up. And that is the presence of -- the various presences of Christ. Christ is present -- capable of a local presence. That means that just like any of us, he can sit at a table. He can walk on a road. He can talk to people. He's present in one place. We don't need an act of faith to understand that. There's another kind of presence that he's capable of. And that's I will local presence. That means that while I was on earth, he could go from one place to another without any space in between. He was not confined to one place. There's one section in the gospels that says when he was being -- when the crowd attacked him -- when the mob attacked him, he passed through them. He's also spoken of in his Easter appearance, he just passed through open doors. And we want to get to that in another moment. He's also capable of omnipresence. That means that since he is God, he can be present wherever God is. Now, we're going to get a little philosophical here. And we shouldn't expound on this too long. Certainly God is present in heaven in a different way than he's present in hell. He's present in Jesus in a different way in that he's present in us. He's present in animal life in a different way than he's present in a vegetable life. But that's all speculation. And that's what we don't want to get into. There's a special presence in the Lord's Supper. Now, when we speak about him being present in his body and blood, we do not mean that he is present in component parts but that he is not present there as a complete person. We mean that he is present there body and soul. God and man. When we say that he is present with his body and blood, we describe this as his sacramental presence. We could also describe this as being present -- we could also describe this as a sacrificial presence. Because when the blood leaves the body, the sacrifice is made. These are not things. The Catholic church saw this as things. And for a long time, they only gave people the body of Christ, the flesh of Christ. Because there is no flesh without blood. You just try that. Take off some flesh, squeeze the blood out. Flesh means -- but that's not the meaning of it. The meaning of it is that we actually receive that which has been sacrificed to God. And that's the sacramental presence. Now, Christ is capable of some of these presences all at the same time. When he was confined to his mother's womb after his conception, he filled all things. When he sat down with -- this is always a question that some Lutherans ask. Did Jesus really partake of the sacrament of his own body and blood? How is that possible? That's a question which I think a Calvinist would ask, a person of Reformed. When Jesus sat at the table with his disciples, that was his local presence. On the table was the sacramental presence, which I call the sacrificial presence. He was present as a sacrifice. And he partook of it. And at the same time, he filled all things. So these are -- these are distinctions that do not have to contradict one another but are very important for the person -- for understanding the person of Jesus. *** 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. ***