The question remains how to understand the
communion with Christ effected by the Lord's Supper, in what way the sacramental union with him
takes place in it. Of course, if Christ is no more
than any
other man, distinguished. from the rest of
humanity only by his mission and his
work, there can be no question of a
partaking of his body and blood, and
the conception of the thing which ap
pears in all the
accounts falls to the
ground. The occurrences of that night must have
been different, must mean something different, from
what these accounts imply. The New-Testament
view of the institution is indissolubly bound up with
the New-Testament conception of the person of
Christ expressed in the New Testament, proclaimed
by the apostles, and received by the primitive
Church. By entering human life and the human
mode of existence, he has so completely incorpo
rated himself with man that he is what he is to man
through his human nature. As through and in this
nature, in inseparable union with mankind, he be
came a sacrifice for us, so he continues to make
us partakers of him under this same aspect of sacri
fice. This is the meaning of his bodily presence
in the Lord's Supper. In this gift of himself is
concentrated all that he is and forever means to be
to mankind in perpetual union. We can have him,
we are meant to have him, for our own, as we can
have no one else. It is no new relation into which
he enters. That which he is for man, and (by vir
tue of his community of blood) with man, finds in
this sacrament its highest expression, as the re
ception of the sacrament is the highest expression
of the faith by which we accept him. And so the
Lord's Supper, although, or rather because, it is
the memorial of his death, is no
mysterium
tremenclum,
but something to be received, as
the first Christians received it
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