is
un-Lutheran position, the third of the Pittsburgh resolutions declares:
"We adhere to the divine authority of the Sabbath as the Lord's Day."
Again, absolution by Christians, and especially the minister of a
Christian congregation, was one of the doctrines abhorred by the
Platform men. As late as 1864 even C.P. Krauth regarded the Eleventh
Article of the Augustana as excluded from the confessional subscription
of the General Synod. The Pittsburgh compromise rejects "priestly
absolution" and maintains "that God only can forgive sins" on earth,
thus openly disavowing a specific Lutheran doctrine and coinciding with
Schmucker and Kurtz, Zwingli, and Calvin. Furthermore, the Lutheran
Church most emphatically teaches "the real presence" of the body and
blood of Christ in the Lord's Supper. And in the days of Schmucker, and
later, this doctrine, openly assailed and denied by the leaders of the
General Synod, was generally, though erroneously, identified with, and
termed, "consubstantiation," without as well as within the General
Synod. The _Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge_, of 1854, edited by J.
Newton Brown, describes "consubstantiation" as "a tenet of the Lutheran
Church respecting the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper. Luther
denied that the elements were changed after consecration, and therefore
taught that the bread and wine indeed remain, but that, together with
them, there is present the substance of the body and blood of Christ,
which is literally received by communicants." As late as 1899 Philip
Schaff wrote in his _Creeds of Christendom_: "The Lutheran Church, as
represented in Luther's writings and in the Form of Concord, rejects
transubstantiation, and also the doctrine of impanation, _i. e._, a
local inclusion of Christ's body and blood in the elements (_localis
inclusio in pane_), or a permanent and extrasacramental conjunction of
the two substances (_durabilis aliqua conjunctio extra usum sacramenti_);
_but it teaches consubstantiation_ in the sense of a sacramental
conjunction of the two substances effected by the consecration, or a
real presence of Christ's very body and blood in, with, and under (_in,
cum, et sub_) bread and wine. The word consubstantiation, however, is
not found in the Lutheran symbols, and is rejected by Lutheran
theologians if used in the sense of impanation." (1, 232.) Down to the
present day the Lutheran doctrine of the real presence has been
universally designated by its op