Unless You Become Like Little Children Taught By God About the Supper

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: “Here you will say with Nicodemus, “How can this be?” [John 3:9]. Must all places and space now become one space and place? Or, as this dolt dreams according to his crude, fleshly sense, must the humanity of Christ stretch and extend itself like a skin as wide as all creation? I answer: Here you must with Moses take off your old shoes, and with Nicodemus be born anew. According to your old notion, which perceives no more than the first, corporeal, circumscribed mode, you will understand this as little as the fanatics, who cannot think of the Godhead in any other way than existing everywhere in a corporeal, circumscribed mode, as if God were some vast, extended entity that pervades and embraces all creation. This you may gather from their charge that we stretch and extend the humanity and thereby enclose the divinity. Such words obviously apply to the corporeal, circumscribed mode of being, as a peasant stuffs himself into his jacket and trousers, when the jacket and trousers are expanded so that they will go around his body and his legs.

Get out of here, you stupid fanatic, with your worthless ideas! If you cannot think in higher and other terms than this, then sit behind the stove and stew pears and apples, and leave such subjects alone. If Christ passed through the closed door with his body, and the door was not on that account expanded nor his body compressed, why should the humanity here be expanded or the divinity enclosed, where there is a far different and more exalted mode of presence?” (Luther’s Works, vol. 37, p.219-220).

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