‘It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption; it is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.’
Σπείρεται ἐν φθορᾷ, ἐγείρεται ἐν ἀφθαρσίᾳ· σπείρεται ἐν ἀτιμίᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δόξῃ· σπείρεται ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ, ἐγείρεται ἐν δυνάμει.
1 Cor. 15:42–3.
LUTHER’S DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST: ITS BASIS AND PURPOSE (1923)
I
‘A CHRISTIAN must know that there is no reliquary on earth more holy than the Word of God, for the sacrament itself is created and blessed and hallowed through God’s Word.’1 In the context in which Luther wrote these words, the statement has primarily a critical significance. There are similar statements also in his earlier writings. The sacrament is what it is only through the Word of God and not otherwise.
Luther defended the validity of this truth on two fronts. First, by repudiating the equation of sacrament with sacrifice. It was not man’s act for God which established the sacrament as such; it was the act of God in joining his Word to a sign. ‘In the sacrament thy God, Christ himself, acts, speaks, works with thee through the priest; and what happens there is no human work or word. There God himself tells thee plainly all the things which have been said by Christ.’2 ‘When a man is to undertake a work together with God and is to receive something from him, it necessarily follows that the man does not begin and lay the first stone. God alone, without any solicitation or demand from men, must come forward and give men direction and promise. The same Word of God comes first, and the Word is the foundation, the rock on which every work, word, thought of men is built. This Word a man must thankfully accept and he must truly believe the divine promise. And he must not doubt that as God promises, so it happens.’3
The Mass is nothing other than ‘a testament and sacrament, in which God makes a promise to us and gives us grace and mercy. So it will not do for us to make out of it a good work, an act of service to God. For a testament gives a benefit; it does not receive one (beneficium datum not acceptum). It is not the acceptance of any benefit from us, but is the gift of a benefit to us.’ How can the acceptance of a bequest be a good work? ‘Only if one were to call it a good work for a man to stand still and let himself be benefited, be given food and drink, be clothed and healed, be helped and set free.’ Therefore ‘there is here not duty (officium) but benefit (beneficium), not work or service, but only enjoyment and profit’.1 It is ‘not my work but God’s; with it I merely let myself be helped and benefited. Therefore, as far apart as are God’s work and my work, so far separated also are conceiving this sacrament to be God’s work and conceiving it to be our work.’2
Certainly at times Luther made the attempt to re-interpret the idea of sacrifice instead of discarding it. We are to ‘offer’ to God ‘an empty and hungry heart’,3 or ‘ourselves and all that we have, with constant prayer’, to offer ‘praise and thanksgiving’. But in the continuation of the last passage, it becomes clear that reinterpretation become rejection. For we are not ourselves to present this sacrifice before the eyes of God; we are to lay it upon Christ and let him present it. He ‘prays for us in heaven, receives our prayer and offering, and through himself as a good priest makes them acceptable before God.’ Therefore, ‘we do not offer Christ, but Christ offers us’.4 The fact that blessing and thanksgiving are included in the Mass, according to the example of Christ, ‘bears witness that men are receiving or have received something from God and are not offering something to God’.5
Luther also repudiated, validating this position again by the Word of God, the identification of sacrament and the sacramental elements. The sacrament as such did not depend on the sacramental character of an element, but on the Word joined to the element. ‘If you cannot accept … the Word, then you do not accept the sacrament, for if the elements are without the Word, they are not sacraments.’6 ‘If the Word of God were not with the bread and wine, there would be no spiritual food, and there would be no exercise of faith. Therefore, food and drink on which God has set his Word and sign are equally spiritual food everywhere, however external and material they may be. And if God tells me to hold up a straw, then there would be spiritual food and drink in the straw—not because of the nature of the straw, but because of the Word and sign of God’s truth7 and presence.’ Again, ‘if God’s Word and sign is not there or is not recognized, then it is no help if God himself be there; even as Christ said of himself (John 6:63) “the flesh profiteth nothing”, because they did not heed the words which he spoke in his flesh, the words which make his body the true food.… Therefore we must not attend merely to God’s works, signs and wonders as blind reason does, but to the Word of God in them as faith does.’ Without the Word, ‘the signs and works of God’ are not there; ‘or if they are there and are seen without the Word, only by the eyes; then men only gaze at them open-mouthed and are momentarily astonished at them as at all other new things which require no faith’.1
Occasionally Luther can also put it conversely. Christ, who is truly this bread, is not to be enjoyed until ‘God speaks the Word thereby, so that you can hear him and recognize him. For what help is it to you if Christ sits in heaven or is under the form of bread? He must be imparted and served and come to words through (!) the inner and the external Word’.2 Even in this converse form, the Word makes the sacrament, that is makes it with spoken words a real sacrament. ‘A thousand times more depends on the words than on the “forms” of the sacrament, and without the words it is a mockery of God’,3 ‘idle gesture and pointing’,4 ‘a body without soul, a cask without wine, a strong-box without money, a form without substance, a sheath without dagger’.5 ‘The words belong in the ears, the signs in the mouth.’6 Or, ‘the words are his divine pledge, promise and testament. The signs are his sacrament, that is, holy signs.’7 And the conclusion in the last two passages runs: ‘much more’ depends ‘on the words than on the signs’; ‘where the preaching was not required, the Mass would never have been instituted’.8 And he continues further: ‘The signs indeed might not exist and man might still have the words and accordingly still be blessed without sacrament, but not without testament.’9
Consistently with this judgement that more depends on the Word than on the sign, Luther showed a certain indifference10 towards the question of the cup for the laity, which so exercised his contemporaries. The Hussites ‘are not right when they think it must be given’. One can equally well take only one element of the sacrament, or none at all ‘as actually the patriarchs did in the desert’.1 Even in his first tract on the Lord’s Supper, directed against the ‘signifiers’, Luther repeated that ‘the most important and the main part of the sacrament is the Word of Christ’, that ‘far more depends on these words than on the sacrament itself’, that it is ‘most necessary’ ‘in the sacrament to lead the people again to the Word.’2
But it would be a serious error if, because of this crucial importance of the concept of the Word, we should try to picture Luther on the way to supporting a mystical, spiritualistic concept of the sacrament. Criticism and negation are the same only for theological dilettanti. Luther meant negatively neither the distinction between sacrament and Word, nor that between the sacrament and the sacramental sign. Such distinction is much too meaningful not to be full of hidden implications. Parallel to the contrast between Word of God and sacramental act and sign runs the other contrast between Word of God and work of God, between promise and being and event, between promising and giving, between conferring benefit and receiving
