Some Lutheran thoughts on the heterodox notion of consubstantiation.
Hutter: When we use the particles ‘in, with, and under’, we understand no local inclusion whatever, not transubstantiation or consubstantiation.” “Hence is clear the odious falsity of those who charge our churches with teaching that ‘the bread of the Eucharist is literally and substantially the body of Christ’, that ‘bread and body constitute one substance…’
**Andrew Osiander: ** “Our theologians for years long have strenuously denied and powerfully confuted the doctrine of a local inclusion, or physical connection of the body and bread, or consubstantiation. We believe in no impanation, subpanation, companation, or consubstantiation of the body of Christ; no physical or local inclusion or conjoining of bread and body, as our adversaries, in manifest calumnies, allege against us.
Mentzer: There is no local concealment of Christ’s body, or inclusion of particles of matter under the bread. Far from us be it that any believer should regard Christ’s body as present in a physical or natural mode. The eating and drinking are not natural or capernaitish, but mystical and sacramental.”
John Gerhard: “On account of the calumnies of our adversaries, we would note that we do not believe in impanation, nor in consubstantiation, nor in any physical or local presence.”
“We believe in no consubstantiative presence of the body and blood. Far from us be that figment. The heavenly thing and the Earthly thing in the Lord’s Supper are not present with each other physically and naturally.
**Musaeus: ** On the question, by what mode (quo modo) that which we receive and eat and drink in the Holy Supper Christ’s body and blood, we freely confess our ignorance.
**Carpsov: ** When this presence is called substantial and bodily, those words designate not the MODE of presence, but the OBJECT. When the words in, with, under, are used, our traducers know, as well as they know their own fingers, that they do NOT signify a CONSUBSTANTIATION, local co-existence, or impanation. The charge that we hold a local inclusion, or Consubstantiation, is a calumny. The eating and drinking are not physical, but mystical and sacramental. An action is not necessarily figurative because it is not physical.
Sasse: It is impossible to define Luther’s doctrine as consubstantiation. Even the words ‘in the bread’, ‘with the bread’, ‘under the bread’, or ‘in, with, and under the bread’, were never regarded by Luther as more than attempts to express in these old, popular terms inherited from the Middle Ages the great mystery that the bread is the body, the wine is the blood, as the Words of Institution say.
Krauth: Consubstantiation. The charge that the Lutheran Church holds this monstrous doctrine has been repeated times without number. In the face of her solemn protestations the falsehood is still circulated. It would be easy to fill many pages with the declarations of the Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and of her great theologians, who, without a dissenting voice, repudiate this doctrine, the name and the thing, in whole and in every one of its parts. In the “Wittenberg Concord,” (1536,) prepared and signed by Luther and the other great leaders in the Church, it is said: “We deny the doctrine of transubstantiation, as we do also deny that the body and blood of Christ are locally included in the bread.” …The manduction is not a thing of the senses or of reason, but supernatural, mysterious, and incomprehensible. The presence of Christ in the supper is not of a physical nature, nor earthly, nor Capernaitish, and yet it is most true.”
and
…This doctrine of Consubstantiation, according to which there are two factors, viz.: the material bread and wine, and the immaterial or spiritual body of Christ united or consubstantiated in the consecrated sacramental symbols, does not differ in kind from the Popish doctrine of Transubstantiation, according to which there is, indeed, but one element in the consecrated symbols, but that is the very body and blood of Christ into which the bread and wine have been transmuted.” Nothing is more difficult, than for a thinker or believer of one school, fairly to represent the opinions and faith of thinkers and believers of another school. On the points on which Dr. Shedd here dwells, his Puritanical tone of mind renders it so difficult for him to enter into the very heart of the historical faith of the Church, that we can hardly blame him, that if it were his duty to attempt to present, in his own language, the views of the Lutheran Church, he has not done it very successfully. From the moment he abandons the Lutheran sense of terms, and reads into them a Puritan construction, from that moment he wanders from the facts, and unconsciously misrepresents.
