That These Words of Christ, “This Is My Body,” Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics

That These Words of Christ, "This Is My Body," Still Stand Firm Against the Fanatics is Martin Luther's first full-length treatise in the eucharistic controversy that divided the Reformation. Published in Wittenberg in 1527, it answers Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich and Johannes Oecolampadius of Basel, who had argued that in the words of institution the verb "is" means "signifies," or that "body" means "a figure of the body," so that the bread remains bread and Christ's body stays in heaven at the right hand of God. Luther had already attacked Andreas Karlstadt on this point and had preached against the "fanatics" (Schwärmer) in 1526, but Zwingli's open appeal to him in early 1527 drew out this sustained reply. Zwingli answered within months, Luther responded again in the 1528 Confession Concerning Christ's Supper, and the two met face to face at Marburg in 1529 without agreement.

Luther's argument turns on one principle: the words of Christ are to be taken as they stand unless Scripture itself compels another reading, and no such compulsion exists. He examines the proposed figurative readings in detail and finds them arbitrary, pointing out that his opponents cannot even agree among themselves on which word carries the figure. He then meets the central objection, that a body seated at God's right hand cannot be on an altar, by arguing that the right hand of God is not a place but the power of God present everywhere, and that since the humanity and divinity of Christ are one undivided person, Christ's body can be wherever God wills it to be. He takes up John 6:63, "the flesh is of no avail," and argues that "flesh" there refers to a fleshly manner of understanding, not to the flesh of Christ, which cannot be useless. Against the charge of crude bodily eating he insists that the body is received spiritually, through faith in the word that gives it, and that the sacrament's benefit is the forgiveness of sins promised in those words. Running beneath the exegesis is Luther's conviction that the opponents have let reason judge Scripture, and that this is the work of the devil rather than of the Spirit.

The treatise set the terms on which Lutheran and Reformed theology would differ for centuries: the christological doctrine of ubiquity, the relation of word and sign, the authority of plain scriptural sense against reasoned inference. It is also unsparing in tone, naming its opponents as instruments of Satan, and it should be read with that polemical frame in view.

Who should read this: those studying the origins of the Lutheran-Reformed divide, the sacramental theology of the Reformation, or Luther's method of reading Scripture, and pastors and theologians who want to understand why the real presence mattered so much to him. It is not an introduction to Luther, not a devotional work, and not for readers seeking an irenic or ecumenical treatment of the Lord's Supper.