LUTHER 1527 Athanasius Accuses The Arians

LUTHER 1527

Besides all these there is the seventh group, who say, “This is no article of faith, therefore we should not quarrel over it; let whoever will believe what he will”… only one reading of the text can be correct. See how clumsily the devil makes fools of us! Well, since there is nothing left in the text to torture but the word “my,” I shall draw this through the fanatics’ flax comb, in order not to leave a single bone of the text whole and untortured, for I wish to leave nothing more for anyone to rave about. But I want to be the best fanatic, and neither disarrange nor corrupt the text, nor interpret a single word in the Scriptures other than the way it reads but let each one stand just as it is written, so Oecolampadius may see that “body” does not of necessity mean “sign of the body.”
Expressed most simply, my fanaticism is this: since Christ said, “Take, eat; this is my body, which is given for you,” let this be his meaning: “In the Old Testament Moses commanded the people to sacrifice the body of an irrational beast, viz. the paschal lamb, but I shall give you another body for the passover feast, viz. the bread, in order to make it easy for everyone to have it, since you Christians must be poor, and in order that my remembrance alone be set forth.” That the bread may be Christ’s body both in name and in reality, however, I shall prove from Scripture better than Oecolampadius proves his “sign of the body.” For the Scriptures say that all things are God’s in name and in reality as for example in Moses (Cf. Lev. 25:23; Exod. 34:10 (cf. Isa. 26:12); Num. 23:5; Deut. 18:18 ff.)  he calls the land of the Jews his land, and our good works his works, our word his word. Again, in Hosea [2:8] he says of the Jews, “They took my gold, my silver, my grain, my oil, my wine, and gave it to their Baal.” And Paul in I Corinthians 15[:38, 40] assures me that every material thing is called corpus or body, since he says, “God gives to each kind of seed its own body, and the celestial bodies are of another kind.” Martin Luther

Athanasius Accuses The Arians

Athanasius accuses the Arians of the Jewish conceit, that divine and human are incompatible. The Jews say How could Christ, if he were God, become man, and die on the cross? The Arians say: How can Christ, who was man, be at the same time God? We, says Athanasius, are Christians; we do not stone Christ when he asserts his eternal Godhead, nor are we offended in him when he speaks to us in the language of human poverty. But it is the peculiar doctrine of Holy Scripture to declare everywhere a double thing of Christ: that he, as Logos and image of the Father, was ever truly divine, and that he afterwards became man for our salvation.
HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH Schaff Volume 3 NICENE AND POST-NICENE CHRISTIANTY A.D. 311-600
(Pages 647-648)