Herman Sasse

Church and Lord's Supper, Hermann Sasse

Baptism stands at the borderline of church and world.

As the Sacrament proper to the church, the Supper is, therefore, as a

matter of principle, not a public event. Thus, the most ancient

church celebrated it behind closed doors (Rev. 3:30). For centuries

thereafter, the arcane discipline kept the liturgy and doctrine of

the Supper strictly secret from Jews and pagans, which is why those

writings of the New Testament intended for the general public, like

the Gospel of John, make no mention of the words of institution for

the Supper.

Whenever the Lord's Supper has been permitted to decay, the boundary

lines between church and world have universally disappeared and the

church has been absorbed into the world.

Christ can be forgotten in preaching, but He cannot be forgotten in the Supper.

How can one pray "Come, Lord Jesus!" Sunday by Sunday and day by day

for nineteen hundred years and more? All these questions find

their answer in the Holy Supper. Because the church possesses this

Sacrament, she can wait for centuries and millennia on end. The

Supper bridges the space of time between Jesus' days on earth and His

return.

In every respect, the Lord's Supper has been the center of the

church. It even determined the beginnings of canon law and of

ecclesiastical organization: A presbyter is one who, at the

Eucharist, has a right to one of the front seats by the altar; a

bishop is one who leads the celebration; and a deacon is one who

"serves at table."

All attempts to build Christian congregations without placing at

their center the congregation-forming Sacrament of the Altar are just

as much condemned to failure as are efforts to renew the Divine

Service without renewing the Lord's Supper. The nineteenth and

twentieth centuries' sad experiences in this area only confirm the

lessons of the past. The enormous effort made in the area of church

planting during recent generations must be regarded as a failure. It

has produced a wealth of societies and files, but not a single

congregation.

For Calvin, the body of Christ as a truly human body exists in finite

form and must, therefore, after the exaltation, be as far removed

from us as heaven is from earth.iiiiii The Lord's body thus cannot

simultaneously be present in heaven and on earth, and in multiple

locations on earth.iiiiiii Calvin is not in a position to

substantiate these assertions from the Bible, for he did not derive

them from the Bible. These are metaphysical statements and

ideological presuppositions that he uses to explain the Supper texts.

No sign testifies with such infallible certainty the death throes of

a congregation, or a whole church, as the decline and decay of the

celebration of the Eucharist. This is, however, the deadly serious

situation in which a very large segment of these Protestant churches

of the world finds itself.

This refusal on Calvin's part to concede the presence of the body and

blood of Christ under the bread and wine made clear to the Lutherans

that the point at issue was not a mere question de modo praesentiae,

involving just "the how" of the presence. Against this understanding

of the dispute, they always objected that this method would permit

any theological controversy to be dismissed as a tempest in a teapot.

Even Arius and Athanasius were agreed that "God was in Christ" and

that "in Him the whole fullness of Godhead dwells bodily." They only

disagreed de modo praesentiae, that is, on the question of how the

whole fullness of Godhead might be in Christ.