And so we come to the question of the Real Presence, which we must touch on here at least briefly. Why was this for Luther the question about the Gospel itself? The Lord Christ is present in all the means of grace. He comes to us in the preaching of the Gospel, in Baptism, and in absolution. In these He is present in His church, which is His body. Also where two or three are gathered in His name, gathered around His Word and Sacrament, there is the body of Christ, the whole body. For the body of Christ is not some sort of organism. It cannot be separated into pieces. It is always completely present, just as the sacramental body is always completely present in each part of the consecrated bread. “Whether one this bread receiveth, or a thousand, still He giveth One sure food that does not fail.”[1] Luther and our Lutheran fathers loved to quote these words from Aquinas's "Lauda Sion salvatorem." They ring on in the Communion hymns of our church. They can and must be applied in an analogous way to the "mystical body," the church, in order to avoid the unbiblical, romantic theory of the church as an organism. The presence in the Sacrament of the Altar, however, is not the same as the presence in the other means of grace. There is today a most earnest struggle going on to understand this presence. There are Catholic and Protestant theologians who speak of it as making Christ's death, Christ's passion contemporary, a re-presentation of His sacrificial death. Among Catholic theologians such theories emerge from the effort to clarify the doctrine of Trent that identifies the sacrifice on the cross with the sacrifice in the Mass. According to the doctrine of Trent the sacrifice of Mass is to be understood as memoria, repraesentatio, and applicatio of the sacrifice on Golgotha. It was the late Benedictine monk, Odo Casel,[2] who propounded the mystery theory that has engaged so much discussion. The point of departure for his exposition of the "cuItic mystery" was the Hellenistic mysteries.
These are then seen as "shadows" of the future mysteries of the church, corresponding to the relationship between nature and supernature [Ubernafur]. The Kyrios of a mystery is a God who has entered into human misery and struggle, has made his appearance on earth (epiphany) and fought here, suffered, even been defeated; the whole sorrow of mankind in pain is brought together in a mourning for the God who must die. But then in some way comes a return to life through which the God's companions, indeed the whole of nature revives and lives on. This was the way of pious faith and the sacred teaching (hieros logos), of society in the earliest mystical age. But the world, society is always in need of life; so the epiphany goes on and on in worship; the saving, healing act of God is performed over and over. Worship [Kult] is the means of making it real once more, and thus of breaking through to the spring of salvation. The members of the cult present again in a ritual, symbolic fashion, that primeval act. ... The mystery, therefore, embraces in the first place the broad concept of ritual "memoria1"---(Anamnesis, co memoratio) the ritual performance and making present [Gegenwaertigsetzung] of some act of the God's, upon which rests the existence and life of a community. (Das Christliche Kultmysterium, 2d ed. [1935]; emphasis added [The Mystery of Christian Worship (l962), 53]).
Justin and the early church could never have dreamed up something like this, certainly not if they remained in agreement with Paul, who did not regard these mysteries as earlier stages of Christian worship but as demonic perversion of divine truth. This whole theory falls to pieces before the simple fact that while the Hellenistic mysteries rest on myths, the Sacrament of the Altar is a matter of history. When did Attis and Osiris live? When did they die? The question is senseless because the myth does not tell of historical events. Jesus Christ, however, is a historical person. His death is a historical event that happened outside the gates of Jerusalem "under Pontius Pilate." The women who went to find His body did not have to wander all around like Cybele and Isis in the myth. They knew the place of His grave. And His resurrection was also a historical event: "On the third day He rose again from the dead." [I Corinthians 15:4] The whole theory was constructed to provide a foundation for the dogma of the identity of the sacrifice on the cross and the sacrifice of the Mass as defined by Trent. But where is there any such foundation in the New Testament? Is it by chance that the passage in the New Testament putting the high priestly work of Christ at the center has the word "once" [ephapax] right at the crucial place? He "entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but His own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption" (Hebrews 9:12). Who dares to interpret away this "once" in view of the words that conclude this great chapter: "Just as it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for Him" (Hebrews 9:27f.).
Hermann Sasse, Letters to Lutheran Pastors 42, 1956
[1] Sumit unus, sumunt mille/ Quantum iste tantum ille/ Nec sumptus consumitur.
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