Sermon for Easter 3B, April 19, 2015

Text: Luke 24:36-49

            Beloved in Christ, one of the serious dangers the church has always faced is to make Christ less than He really is. Most people don’t have a problem with believing in a God who is all-powerful. They do have a problem with believing in an all-powerful God who gets so much into the muck and mire of our life that He will take on our human nature. Most people don’t have a problem with a holy man who spouts off pearls of great wisdom. They do have a problem with a holy man who is also true God. Most people don’t have a problem with the idea that something in a human being survives death—a soul or some such thing. They do have a problem with someone rising from the dead and continuing to exist in body as well as soul. In short, most people don’t want a real Lord God in the flesh. And once He has been killed off, they don’t want Him back in the flesh again. They don’t want Him standing authoritatively in their midst.

            But we in the Christian church want no other Jesus. When the disciples thought that Jesus was merely a ghost, they were frightened. Only when they realized that it truly was the risen Lord were their hearts calmed. A ghostly Jesus terrifies. A risen Lord in the flesh brings comfort.

            Think of the comfort that our Lord brings and think of the comfort that some people would substitute. Every so often you hear people say after a loved one has died, “As long as we remember them, they will live on in our hearts.” That sentiment is cold comfort. After all, we are all forgetful. Does that mean that whenever we forget our loved one, even just for a while, they have ceased to exist? It’s a ridiculous and cruel notion. And if we believed that about Christ, it would give us no hope.

            After all, we want more than just memories. We face flesh-and-blood problems. We need a flesh-and-blood Savior. We need a Savior who was so flesh-and-blood that He could march into death to deal with our very real sins. And we need a flesh-and-blood Savior who has risen again to give us forgiveness and new life. We need a flesh-and-blood Savior who will continue to work in and through us, as He daily forgives our sins and guides us in paths of righteousness. An idea or a memory is not enough for us Christians. Anything less than the real Jesus—the real God in human flesh—won’t cut it.

            But where do we meet this risen Savior? I think most of us would naturally think of the Lord’s Supper, where our risen Lord gives us His very body and blood under the bread and wine. Most certainly He is there—in the flesh. He is there in perhaps the most powerful way that we can imagine. He brings His very body and blood that won our salvation. He not only shows His body and blood to us, but He gives us these very things for us to eat and to drink, to assimilate them into our very being, so that He and we can be closely bound for all eternity. But it is not a dead Lord who does these things, but the very much alive Jesus Christ. For just as it was the living Christ who instituted the sacrament on Maundy Thursday, so it is the Christ who lives again who continues to serve as our host at this most holy meal. Here we encounter Christ as in no other way—as host and banquet—as we come with hungry souls in weary bodies.

            Not that that is not the only place we encounter the risen Lord. No, when we were baptized, we were united in a very real and powerful way with His death and resurrection, yes, with Christ Himself. But today’s Gospel reminds us that we encounter our risen Lord in another way, namely, through the Scriptures. The Scriptures are about Jesus Christ from beginning to end, from Genesis to the Revelation. And when those Scriptures are read, the Holy Spirit brings us fully into the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ.

            But you may say, “Is the Old Testament about Jesus? After all, He hadn’t been born then.” But from beginning to end, the Bible is about Christ. He was there when we were created, for He, the Father, and the Holy Spirit held a special conference before creating us and they agreed, “Let us make man in our own image.” And as soon as mankind turned to sin, His birth was foretold. He would be the “offspring of the woman.” Since nothing was mentioned about His being an offspring of a man, one could already understand that He would have no earthly father but would be born of a virgin. He would come to “crush [the devil’s] head,” even though it would come at the great pain of having His heel bruised.

            With the dawn of every new era, there would be a further prophecy given about what He would be like. After the flood, Shem was told that he would be the ancestor of Christ; several centuries later, Abraham was told the same; and then Abraham was told that this blessing would come through Isaac, not through Ishmael. Generation by generation this promise was passed down: to Isaac, to Jacob, and then to Judah. Before Jacob died, He foretold how Christ would come from Judah, but only when Judah would lose total control over its people, which occurred when Pilate took away the right for the Jewish council to hear capital cases. (Even in exile, the Jewish community had retained that right.)

            Now as we turn to Exodus, you might think that here the story wanders away from Christ, but that would be wrong. God delivered the Israelites from slavery to the Egyptians, but it was no mere political act or military act on God’s part. After all, there have been all sorts of oppressed nations throughout world history. Why did God single out the Israelites? He wanted to foreshadow the sort of deliverance that God would provide through the Messiah. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb spared the Israelites from death and set them from bondage, so too our Lord’s death set us free from bondage to sin and death. Just as God commanded the building of the tabernacle and instituted the office of high priest, so Christ would be our true temple and our great high priest. Israel was called to be God’s people and to bring His light and salvation to the whole world, but they ultimately failed. That is why Christ had to come.

            This is underscored by two passages in the books written by Moses. You see, you could get the false impression that the first five books of the Bible (called the Pentateuch) are just about Moses delivering the Israelites and establishing a new nation. You might think, as the Jews today still do, that Moses’ law was the culmination of all of Israel’s hopes, and that was that. But in one of Moses’ last sermons he said that God would raise up a greater prophet than himself, for He would speak with the very voice of God. Shortly before he had said those words, the prophet Balaam had outlined Israel’s history, from Israel’s settling in the Promised Land to the coming of the Romans. But as far as Balaam was concerned, everything revolved around “the Star of Jacob,” the one whose coming would not happen for centuries, but whose coming would change everything.

            The Prophets added further details to what the Law of Moses had revealed. So too did the Psalms. We do not have time now to explain all the passages in the Bible that foretold the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. Several come to mind. David was told that He would be the ancestor of our Lord. Micah foretold that Christ would be born in Bethlehem. Isaiah gave such complete descriptions of our Lord’s life and ministry that he has been called “the fifth evangelist.” Indeed, Handel’s Messiah, which tells the life of Christ, is drawn largely from Isaiah, not from the four New Testament gospels. In all the prophetic books of the Old Testament you see a common pattern. The prophet will complain about the wickedness of his generation and call people to repent, but he will also point forward to the coming of Christ. The Messianic promises are almost always an exact antidote to the current problems that the prophet was facing.

            Of course, that’s still true today. Just as the Old Testament Scriptures proclaimed “that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead” so “that repentance and forgiveness of sins” could be also preached, so we in the New Testament proclaim that Christ has died and risen from the dead and we call people to repent of their sins and to receive the forgiveness of their sins.

            Beloved in Christ, may you understand the Scriptures fully and believe what they are saying, and thereby meet the real flesh-and-blood Jesus who has risen from the dead! Amen.

The Myth of Consubstantiation

In 2009 I purchased a copy of Nathan Feldman’s Pocket Dictionary of Church History—overall, an impressive work that had an uncanny ability to cover a broad range of material to define terms concisely and accurately. More recently I purchased Jeffrey Burton Russell’s Exposing Myths about Christianity, which attempts to defend Christianity from its detractors without taking any one particular side in intramural discussions but offering arguments for all sides.

Both works, however, failed miserably in their discussion of the Lutheran doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. Feldman writes under the entry entitled “consubstantiation”: “Martin Luther developed the Eucharistic doctrine known as consubstantiation, which in time became closely identified with Lutheranism….Thus, for Luther there is a ‘real physical presence’ of Christ in, under, and around the Communion elements, but the bread and wine do not change in substance as in the Roman Catholic view of transubstantiation.” Russell makes the same error (p. 297): “Luther condemned transubstantiation and substituted the idea of ‘consubstantiation,’ in which the consecrated bread and wine are both bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ. Both interpretations depend on Aristotelian philosophy, so neither is a necessary way of defining how Christ is present.”

There are three major errors involved. The first is that “consubstantiation” is the term used to define the Lutheran doctrine. I have been a Lutheran for nearly half a century and that of the more confessionally attuned variety. (I’m a Missouri Synod Lutheran.) The term was never used in my confirmation instruction nor was it to be found in the Synodical Catechism, either of 1943 or 1986. In all my seminary education I may have heard the term once or twice, and then it was the sainted Dr. Robert Preus uttering the term with contempt and saying, “How can non-Lutherans say that we believe in consubstantiation? Don’t they read anything?”

Perhaps this was just an oddity of my experience. But if you look at the great Lutheran treatises on the Lord’s Supper written in the twentieth century, you would again and again notice the absence of the term. John Stephenson’s book on the Lord’s Supper in the Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics series fails to mention it. So too does Hermann Sasse’s work, This is My Body, a serious examination of Luther’s thoughts on the sacrament. You will not find the term in Werner Elert’s The Structure of Lutheranism or Edmund Schlink’s Theology of the Lutheran Confessions, and other such surveys of Lutheran doctrine. Nor will you find it mentioned in Lutheran dogmatics (such as Francis Pieper’s Christian Dogmatics) or, if it does merit mention in passing, it is stated with disapproval. If consubstantiation is Lutheran doctrine, Lutherans have been keeping it a good secret.

Is the problem that modern Lutherans don’t know their history? Could it be that the term was used by earlier Lutheran dogmaticians and has since died in obscurity? An examination of Philip Melanchthon’s Loci or Martin Chemnitz’s Loci—two early Lutheran dogmatics—will prove that idea wrong. Nor will you find John Gerhard, the greatest Lutheran dogmatician of the age of orthodoxy, giving his imprimatur to the term. In fact, he heartily disapproves of it in his Harmony of the Gospels (chapter 171, leaf 784):

Quando veram, realem et substantialem corporis (et sanguinis) Christi praesentiam nos credere profitemur, nequaquam vel impanationem, vel incorporationem, vel consubstantiationem, vel physicam inclusionem, vel localem praesentiam, vel delitescentiam corpusculi sub pane, vel essentialem panis in corpus conversionem, vel durabilem corporis ad panem extra usum coenae affixionem, vel personalem panis et corporis unionem statuimus. (Emphasis in original)

When we confess that we believe in the true, real, and substantial presence of the body (and blood) of Christ, in no way do we imagine either an impanation or consubstantiation or a physical confinement or a local presence or the hiding of a particle underneath the bread or the conversion of the essence of the bread into the body or the permanent joining of the body to the bread outside the use of the supper or a personal union of the bread and the body. (My translation)

If any of the Lutheran dogmaticians of the seventeenth century were to use such quasi-Aristotelian terminology as consubstantiation, it would have been John Gerhard. But he explicitly rejects that term.

Well, then, neither modern Lutheranism nor the golden age of Lutheran orthodoxy used that term for their position. But surely this must be the doctrine taught by the Lutheran confessions (the Book of Concord), right? Again, you will not even find the term mentioned, although the Formula of Concord does reject some of the same things Gerhard does (such as impanation and local presence) that are frequently equated with consubstantiation. If we can find no other source, must we conclude that Luther is the author of consubstantiation? Again you can look at all of Luther’s works—and his substantial sacramental writings have all been translated into English—and you will find that there are only two mentions of consubstantiation in the American Edition of Luther’s Works, once in a footnote (footnote 152 on volume 40, page 196) and once in an introduction (for volume 37), and in each instance merely to disabuse the reader of the notion that Luther believed in consubstantiation.

Serious non-Lutheran scholars also concur that Lutherans do not believe in consubstantiation. Richard A. Muller, himself a Reformed theologian and therefore without a Lutheran ax to grind, nevertheless writes these words about consubstantiation in his Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms (pp. 80-81):

According to the theory of consubstantiation, the body and blood of Christ become substantially present together with the substance of the bread and wine, when the elements are consecrated. This theory is frequently confused with the Lutheran doctrine of real presence. Consubstantio indicates the presence of Christ’s body according to a unique sacramental mode of presence that is proper to Christ’s body as such, and is therefore a local presence (praesentia localis, q.v.); the Lutheran view, however, argues a real, but illocal presence of Christ’s body and blood that is grounded in the omnipresence of Christ’s person, and therefore a supernatural and sacramental, rather than a local, union with the invisible elements of the sacrament….Consubstantio implies only a presence and not a union of Christ and the sacramental elements; it was taught as a possibility by Duns Scotus, John of Jandun, and William of Occam.

Muller not only points out that the nomen (name) of consubstantiation does not apply to Lutherans (the real term for the Lutheran doctrine is “the real presence”), but neither does the res (substance). And here we come to the second misunderstanding. Feldman states that the Lutheran view is that “there is a ‘real physical presence’ of Christ in, under, and around the Communion elements.” Such a definition would fit the view held by Scotus and company, but it ill fits the view of Lutherans, who do not believe in a local or “physical” presence. Moreover, while a person may believe in either consubstantiation or transubstantiation without believing in the sacramental union, the sacramental union is at the heart of the Lutheran view of the matter.

The third error (one made by Russell) is that Luther was beholden to Aristotelian philosophy in this matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Already at the time of the Heidelberg Disputations (1518), Luther had rejected the use of philosophy in defining theology and stated that he was especially distrustful of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Well, if consubstantiation is not a Lutheran term and does not express the Lutheran doctrine, why do so many non-Lutheran books say that it is the Lutheran view? It began with John Calvin’s 1553 broadside against Lutheranism in which he accused the Lutherans of believing in consubstantiation. It was meant to be a polemical term, and in the years that followed it would often be accompanied by others such as “impanation,” “Capernaitic eating,” “artolatry,” and the like. But calling consubstantiation “the Lutheran view of the Lord’s supper” is as accurate as defining Pelagianism as “the Arminian view of salvation” or fatalism as “the Calvinist worldview.” While polemicists may speak in that manner, it is improper for those claiming to be impartial observers to describe a movement by using its enemy’s slurs and distortions.

The real doctrine that Lutherans teach about the Lord’s Supper can be described under three terms: sacramental union, oral eating, and eating of the ungodly. We speak of a sacramental union; the bread and wine are united with the body and blood of Christ, as Paul clearly teaches in 1 Cor. 10:16 and as our Lord’s words in instituting the sacrament state (“This is my body…This is the new testament in my blood”). The exact mode in which Christ can effect this sacramental union is never stated in Lutheran theology. We know that He is omnipotent and can be anywhere and everywhere He wants to be. He has more modes of presence than we can name or understand. (See Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration 102-103.) We also teach that one receives Christ’s body and blood through the eating of the bread and wine, not through ascending to heaven in a mystical experience. Because the body and blood of Christ come through the bread and wine, all who commune receive the body and blood of Christ, not just those who do so in faith. Thus, it is quite possible for the ungodly to eat and drink damnation upon themselves by receiving Christ’s body and blood without discernment, as Paul clearly warns in 1 Corinthians 11:27-30.

This is the Lutheran view in a nutshell. Don’t expect American evangelicals to grasp it—let alone explain it accurately—anytime soon.