In 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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In 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).