Person of Christ Divided in Reformed Sacramentology?

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Bernard_Marx

Puritan Board Freshman
I have a friend who recently has become quite enamoured with Lutheran Theology. We talk much about the Lutheran view of the Lord's Supper, which I find not only unscriptural but also patently illogical. It seems as though the Lutheran theologians I've read (admittedly I've only been studying this topic for about two weeks) that they're more than willing to accept total contadictions in their beliefs (and I'm talking about the major theologians here).

However it seems as though these theologians are willing to use logic to defeat Reformed theology, the same logic they so readily decry. One such piece of logic they use is when they claim Reformed theology wringly divides Christ in its insistance that Christ is spiritually present in the Lord's Supper, not bodily.

In thinking about this it occured to me that perhaps the Lutherans are committing a bit of a Red Herring here...if Christ's presence in the Lord's Supper flows through the Holy Spirit which in turn flows through Christ who is seated in Heaven...then is there a division?

If anyone can shed some other light on this Lutheran objection or help me work through the "answer" I've given that'd be swell.
 
One major problem that the Lutherans have with their view of the Supper is the ubiquity of Christ. This issue is also a problem for the RC's.

You might want to ask your Lutheran friend why the Lutheran Church never accepted Melanchton's "revision" to the Augsburg Confession, which restated the language regarding the Lord's Supper to a more Reformed view. In fact it was a view that Calvin had accepted and a view that played a part in the attempt to reconcile the Lutheran churches with the Swiss Reformed churches in Geneva and Zurich.
 
they're more than willing to accept total contadictions in their beliefs

Yeah, I found that out when discussing limited atonement with a lutheran. He believed in unconditional election but also believed in a "universal" atonement. He understood the contradictions but it didn't seem to matter.
 
I read somewhere that Luther lamented the fact that he and Calvin were not able to sit down and really discuss the issue of Communion. He had said that they could have possibly resolved their differences.
 
"Consubstantiation" is a quasi-Papist spin on "Transubstantiation"... Old ways and doctrines don't die so quickly. The Reformers were still reforming after Luther, though he got his soteriology right. The idea is that in the communion, the body and blood of Christ, and the bread and wine, coexist in union with each other. Luther tried to explain it by the analogy of the iron put into the fire. The fire and iron are united in the red-hot iron and yet each continues unchanged. Calvin simply explained it in terms of Holy Spirit's presence with believer who partakes in Communion.

:detective:

[Edited on 12-30-2004 by Puritanhead]
 
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