The title comes from Martin Luther's "The Last Sermon in Wittenberg" and, more fully reads: I stomp all over reason and its wisdom and say, "Shut up, you cursed whore! Are you trying to seduce me into committing fornication with the devil?"
Big props, preacher dude. There's no place for rational discourse in religious matters.
Recently, buried in the comments on another blog (here) was a discussion of whether Lutherans believe in transubstantiation or consubstantiation. As a Catholic friend of mine once said, the choice boils down to "either you're a vampire and a cannibal or you're a heretic." Glaven stated that Protestants believe in consubstantiation (that is, that Christ is present "in, with and under" the sacrament of the eucharist, but that the bread does not become the actual flesh of Christ) and he had the audacity to back his claim with quotes from reliable sources. Fie! Fie, I say! The generalization was too great for me not to take exception. I was fairly certain that Luther believed in transubstantiation; he was, after all, a Catholic monk before his excommunication. That meant I'd have to dig.
The answer turns out, as usual, to be complicated. Philipp Melanchthon's Augsburg Confession, the original source of Glaven's sources, does indeed espouse consubstantiation, but Melanchthon, being too clever for his own good, frequently bent Luther's words to fit his own interpretation of the truth. Luther wrote so much over so long a time, that one can argue he believed either idea or both at different times. His "Large Catechism" does appear to hold to transubstantiation, but his "Little Catechism" equivocates: What is the sacrament of the altar? It is the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under the bread and wine, instituted by Christ himself for us Christians to eat and to drink. [In the original German, the "unter" can mean "beneath", "underlying," or "the ground and basis of" and thus could mean either doctrine.]
The 1580 Lutheran Book of Concord cemented that consubstantiation was to be Lutheran doctrine (long discussion here), so, for practical purposes, Glaven is right. The beauty of religion, however, is that being right is meaningless! What Luther would probably have to say about the matter would be a Biblical quote: "Avoid petty quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless." (Titus 3:9) In other words, "Shut up, you cursed whore!"
As for me, following Luther's habit of going to the original sources (before the Protestant Reformation, only priests were allowed to read the Bible), Luke 22:19 reads: Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them saying, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me." Heretic to the bone that I am, I believe that the "this" refers not to the bread but to the action of breaking the bread. Christ is not the bread, but the action, just as Christianity is not a dead object, but a continuous action that sustains life as mere bread cannot.
Interesting
3 hours ago
3 comments:
Setting aside the confessions and Melanchthon v. Luther, both of the mainline Lutheran church bodies reject consubstantiation and believe in the "real presence" doctrine. I'm not asserting that either the ELCA or LCMS are correct, though (although I happen to agree with them).
The LCMS stance is fairly straightforward, with their definition of consubstantiation here:
LCMS on Consubstantiation
and their doctrine of the means of grace here (at IV.3)
LCMS on the Means of Grace
The ELCA doctrine is tougher to find because any important documents and webpages have been lost in the abyss of broken links that is their new website. However, in this document [pdf]
ELCA and UMC
for the interim eucharistic sharing of the ELCA and UMC, there is a reference on page 4 that the UMC mistakenly believes that Lutherans subscribe to consubstantiation.
Would Luther or Melanchthon agree with either church body? I'm not sure. But since ~4 million Lutherans in the US officiallyhold a doctrine of "Real Presence" instead of consubstantiation, we should hold these doctrines distinct.
Thanks, Matt! In the previous discussion, I'd said it probably comes down to matters of definition and I'd completely forgotten about the difference between "real presence" and "consubstantiation" as I have never used either and tried to ignore the subject whenever possible.
It always comes down to definitions. When Luther met with Zwingli and wrote "est" (Latin: is) in the dust on that table (allegedly), he evidently thought he thereby refuted Zwingli's contention that Christ's "presence" in the bread and wine was purely symbolic - because Christ said, "This is my body" ... not "This symbolizes my body".
But guess what? Bill Clinton was right all along. It depends on what you mean by "is". People routinely state that things are what they obviously are NOT and, moreover, do it knowingly; but it's not a lie or a falsehood. When you hand a ring to the girl you love and say, "This is my heart, as well", that's not a lie; it's a metaphor. She's not obliged to believe that the metal of the ring is consubstantial with your heart, or that it has been mystically transubstantiated into heart muscle, specifically your heart muscle.
And yet she can believe that that ring is, indeed, also your heart. [And if you tell her your heart is on fire with desire for her, Luther would call 911 because you said "est".]
That "est" in the dust was not the refutation Luther thought it was because language is never that simple. We know that the Jesus of the Bible routinely spoke figuratively.
Was he doing so at the last Supper? Who knows? You can't even get the four Gospels to agree on the basic facts of that one event.
But it's pretty clear that Luther didn't buy the doctrine of transubstantiation because he thought it lacked a clear scriptural basis. (He's right; it does.) In my response to your original comment, I conceded that you could argue over whether "consubstantiation" is the correct term for Lutherans; I'll happily concede it's not. I won't say I never said it was, because in the post I said, in my guise as a we're-better-than-you pseudo-Catholic uber-prick, that "Protestants" believe in consubstantiation. Well, now, that's obviously false, but that's what we uber-Catholics do: Lump all you left-footers together.
It's all angels dancing on the head of a pin, in the end.
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