This second contrast points clearly to its own transcending. Must not the first contrast between (the same!) Word and the sacramental act and sign (which indeed presents and proclaims the second contrast) share in the prospect of that transcending? Was not the ‘and is made’ (et fit) in the Augustinian canon, ‘the Word is joined to the element and it is made sacrament’, to be more true and more important for Luther than the critical ‘is added’ (accedit)? A further group of passages shows us that Luther’s thinking on the Word in the Lord’s Supper did of necessity proceed in this direction.
It is at once evident that in many of the passages already cited, Luther speaks, not of ‘the Word’ but of ‘the words’. However, these ‘words’ (no proof is needed) are the instituting words of Christ at the Last Supper, according to the Synoptics and Paul. These recorded words of God make the Lord’s Supper a mighty Word, the Word and Work of God, the real sacrament.1 We come now to a plain statement of the position from which alone the interpretation of the development postulated above is to be understood. ‘But I set against the decisions of all the Fathers, against the wisdom and word of all angels, men or devils, the Scripture and the Gospel. Therein it is plainly stated that the Mass is a Word and Work of God, in which God promises and manifests his grace. Here I stand, here I challenge, here I walk proudly and say, God’s Word is for me above all. God’s majesty stands beside me, therefore I yield not a hair’s breadth, though a thousand Augustines and a thousand separate churches were against me. I am certain that the true Church holds to God’s Word with me; let the so-called churches depend on men’s words.’2 Even in these recorded words of God there is a limitation. In them God ‘bears witness that remission of sins is given to all who believe; Christ’s body is given and his blood is shed for them’.3 The words contain the promise (promissio) in which Luther recognizes the Word of God. Because of the specific content of this promise, Luther explains the whole Christian message as nothing but an exposition of the words of the Lord’s Supper. ‘The preaching should be nothing but the explanation of the words of Christ when he said, This is my body.… What is the whole Gospel except an explanation of this testament?’4 ‘For this would be teaching faith and truly building the Church.’5
What then can the Mass, the sacramental act and sign to which these words of Christ apply, be, other than the testament itself as explained in the preaching, the highest actual fulfilment of those words of promise? And therefore obviously Luther can make the equation: the Mass=the New Testament, as he does in the title of the important treatise of 1520;6 or he can call the Mass ‘the centre of the eternal and new testament’ in the title of another writing of 1522.7
‘These words’ are the meaning and content of the Mass. ‘As I said, the whole virtue of the Mass consists in the words of Christ.’8 ‘If we wish to hold Mass rightly and to understand it, we must let go of everything which the eyes and all the senses may show us in the service … until we stand before the Word of Christ; and we must fully realize that with the Word, he consummates and establishes the Mass and has commanded us to consummate it. For on that Word the Mass wholly depends, with all its nature, work, use and fruit; otherwise nothing of the Mass is received.’1 ‘Therefore if you will worthily receive the sacrament and testament, see that you bring forward these living words of Christ, that you establish yourself upon them with strong faith, and that you crave what Christ has promised you in them. And so it will be yours, if you are worthy and ready.’ Thus it is necessary to believe the words of Christ and so to allow them to be true. Everything depends on the words ‘which one grasps as firmly as gold and jewels, and keeps nothing else more steadily before the eyes of the heart’.2 Luther makes everything so dependent on the ‘words’ that he can identify the Lord’s Supper with their content. ‘You see therefore that the Mass is the promise of the remission of sins made to us by God, and it is such a promise that it was confirmed by the death of the Son of God.’3 This promise it is which makes the sacraments (of both the Old and New Testaments) to be a sacrament, in distinction from a mere sign. God promises that ‘whoever has the sacrament, is to have with it this and that good’.4
The concept of ‘testament’ which was so important to Luther in 1520 was used in a brief formulation in the following way: ‘The testator, Christ, is about to die; the words which they now call words of consecration are the words of the testament; the inheritance is the forgiveness of sin promised in the testament. The heirs are all who believe.’ These four components ‘complete the testament’.5
According to this interpretation as given by Luther himself the words of the testament are not the whole ‘testament’. They point backward, back to the testator, and point forward to the inheritance and the heirs. It therefore will not and cannot be possible to persist in understanding the sacrament as testament which is only promise! The emphasis must now be put on the other side. ‘These words’ are the meaning and content of the sacrament. They make the sacrament. But actually they require (for us!) an endorsement of what they say to us. For there, where the promise appears as endorsed, there is the sacrament. The fact that in need, ‘in the desert’1 the implementation must be and is dispensed with, does not change the rule that we need the implementation and nothing can alter at all the power of the ‘endorsed’ promise. The possibility of declaring the sacrament to be something superfluous lies as little within the range of Luther’s thought as does doubt that the Word really makes the sacrament. On both points, that the Word necessarily establishes the sacrament and that it possesses effectuating power, Luther is consistent throughout. (Even here he is in agreement with Augustine’s visible word.)
The Word becomes visible as sacrament, is revealed and brought within our sight, so to speak, for a transaction in ‘open court’ (publici juris). It moves outside the sphere of the merely audible and intelligible to the threshold of the world of sight and touch. (Exactly so much and no more, in my judgement, should be said here.) ‘Hence it follows that the sacraments, that is the external words of God spoken by a priest, are in truth a great consolation and are perfectly comprehensible signs of God’s purpose. On them a man should support himself as on a good staff, like the one with which the patriarch Jacob went through Jordan. Or they should be like a lantern by which a man guides himself, on which he must keep his eyes steadily as he walks the long road of death, sin and hell.’2
Luther interpreted the elevation of the host, not as a sacrifice (oblatio) to God, but as ‘an admonition to us, by which we are summoned to faith in this testament which [the officiating priest] so exhibits and proclaims with the words of Christ, while at the same time he shows the sign of it; and the lifting up of the bread fitly corresponds to the proclamation, “this is my body” ’.3
But Luther prefers to the figure of the relation of promise and sign that of the seal, which he connects with the idea of the testament. ‘His words are for us like a letter, and his signs are like a seal or signet.’4 ‘This is what the priest means when he raises the host. He addresses us rather than God, as if he meant to say: Look here, this is the seal and sign of the testament in which Christ assigned to us the forgiveness of sins and eternal life.’1 Through this seal, the promise is given to me, a binding promise, so that the content (although it is not yet in my possession) is my legal property, so that the promise becomes a deed of transfer. ‘This is the use of the sacrament: thou art able to say, I have this clear (apertum) word (in the German, ‘here I clearly have this word’), my sins are forgiven. Also I have received the seal, I have eaten and drunk. This I can certainly prove, for I have done it in the sight of Satan and the world.’2
Thus while the figure of the ‘testament’ is kept, and I am told that I am the heir and the inheritance is mine, the Word which has clearly come to the threshold of sight and touch in order to tell me this, has ceased to be a second component, separate from the sacramental act and sign. The hidden penetration has occurred in power, and the sacrament is made (et fit sacramentum). ‘Behold, this is then truly God’s Word, Christ is the bread. The bread is God’s Word, and yet is a thing, a piece of bread.
