I Confess God’s Word, But I Do Not Understand It

cropped-Luther-seal.jpgIn response to the fanatics who claimed the Christ’s Body was at the right hand in heaven, and thus couldn’t be in the Lord’s Supper on earth: “This is a lofty subject,” you say, “and I do not understand it.” Yes, this is my complaint too, that these fleshly spirits who scarcely know how to crawl on the earth, untested in faith, inexperienced in spiritual matters, wish to fly aloft above the clouds and measure and judge these profound, mysterious, incomprehensible matters not according to God’s words but according to their crawling and walking on the earth. They will fare as Icarus did in the poet’s story. For they too have stolen others’ feathers—i.e. texts of Scripture—and fastened them on with wax—i.e. adjusted them to their own interpretation with reason—and now they fly aloft. But the wax melts, and they fall into the sea and drown in all kinds of errors.

Christ says, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe me, how can you believe it if I tell you heavenly things?” [John 3:12]. Behold, this is entirely an earthly and bodily thing, when Christ’s body passes through the stone and the door. For his body is an object which can be laid hold of, as much so as the stone and the door. Still, no reason can grasp how his body and the stone are in one place at the same time when he passes through it, and yet neither does the stone become larger or expand more, nor Christ’s body smaller or more compressed. Here faith must blind reason and lift it out of the physical, circumscribed mode into the second, uncircumscribed mode which it does not understand but cannot deny” (Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p.220-221).

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