Again, according to Harnack, the mould in which Luther cast his doctrine of the Supper once more involved him in contradictions which rendered his position untenable.
On the one hand, by so strenuously insisting on the belief in the Real Presence as a binding doctrinal formula he was untrue to his own theory that doctrine was not to be formulated; on the other hand, his restatement of the doctrine of the Supper emptied it of all content. It was “in part the fault of his formulating of the faith that the later Lutheran Church, with its Christology, its teaching on the Sacrament ... and the false standard by which it judged divergent doctrines and pronounced them heretical, threatened for a while to become a sort of caricature of the Catholic Church.”[1830]
Harnack notes how Luther, the better to reach the real meaning of the words “This is My Body,” actually called tradition to his aid, in his case an extremely illogical thing to do. His consciousness that in holding fast to the Real Presence he was backed by the whole Church of yore lends his words unusual power. “Even were a hundred thousand devils and all the fanatics to fall upon it, still the doctrine must stand firm.”[1831] We may add, that, with regard to this sacrament, Luther outdid his adversaries in his attachment to tradition and antiquity, reintroducing communion under both kinds as being alone in strict accord with Scripture.
There was also much that was personal and arbitrary in the doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar as shaped anew and established by Luther. For one thing, he dwelt far too exclusively on this sacrament being the pledge of the forgiveness of sins. Again, in his desire to counter Zwingli, he put forward theories on the sacrament, which embody all sorts of disadvantages and contradictions not to be found in the teaching of the earlier Church. He, indeed, denied Transubstantiation, but the “Swiss could not for the life of them see why he did, since he admits that a stupendous miracle takes place in the Supper.”[1832]
For the Church’s ancient doctrine of Transubstantiation he substituted Impanation, and even this he admitted only in the actual celebration and reception.[1833] “The awkward part was,” says Harnack, “that, according to Luther, the Body and Blood of Christ were present in the Supper only for the purpose of reception, though they might be partaken of even by an unbeliever or a heathen.”[1834] The concomitance (presence of both Body and Blood under either kind) taught by the olden Church, which, indeed, was a natural corollary of the Real Presence, he set aside, urged thereto by his theory that in Communion both kinds must be received; the only result was to introduce a new and uncalled-for miracle. To this must be added what Harnack calls the “crazy speculations on the ubiquity of the Body of Christ,”[1835] which furnished Melanchthon his principal reason for giving up Luther’s doctrine of the Supper, and, like Zwingli and Bucer, denying the Real Presence. According to Luther, the ubiquity of the Body of Christ rested on the supposed “real communication of the Divine ‘idiomata’ (and consequently of the Divine omnipresence) to the humanity of Christ.”[1836]
Nor does the Real Presence, according to Luther, begin at the consecration; as to when it does, he leaves the faithful in the dark; nor does he enlighten them as to when it ceases in the remains left over after communion; in the latter regard his practice was full of contradictions.—In allowing communion to be carried to the sick in their own houses he was again unfaithful to his tenets.[1837] To any processions of the sacrament he was averse, because Christ was only present at the time of reception.
He proposed, as the better plan, that the sacrament should not be adored save by bending the knee when receiving it, and yet his own behaviour did not tally with his proposal.[1838] It was enacted at Wittenberg, in 1542, that there should be no elevation, and yet Luther had retained this rite at an earlier date, in order to defy Carlstadt, as he says, and so as not to seem in this “indifferent matter” to sanction by his attitude Carlstadt’s attack on the sacrament.[1839] He was, to say the least, verbally illogical when he termed the Eucharist the “sacrificium eucharisticum,” meaning of course thereby that it was a “thank-offering” on the part of the faithful.
It is not surprising that belief in the Real Presence, though so strongly defended by Luther, gradually evaporated in his Church largely owing to the inconsistencies just noticed. Eventually the Lutherans made their own the views of Zwingli and Melanchthon on the sacrament, though they retained an affection for certain vague and elastic terms concerning the reception of the Body and Blood of Christ.[1840] Luther spoke of the attempts to introduce Zwingli’s rationalistic doctrine of the sacrament at Frankfurt-on-the-Main as “a diabolical jugglery with the words of Christ,” “whereby simple souls are shamefully duped and robbed of their sacrament.” The thing was “handled in such a way that no one was certain what was meant or what to believe.”[1841]