Sacramental union

Sacramental union (Latin: unio sacramentalis; Martin Luther's German: Sacramentliche Einigkeit;[1] German: sakramentalische Vereinigung) is the Lutheran theological doctrine of the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Christian Eucharist (see Eucharist in Lutheranism).

It is seen as similar to the personal union in the analogue of the uniting of the two perfect natures in the person of Jesus Christ in which both natures remain distinct: the integrity of the bread and wine remain though united with the body and the blood of Christ.

Thus it is not our word or speaking but the command and ordinance of Christ that, from the beginning of the first Communion until the end of the world, make the bread the body and the wine the blood that are daily distributed through our ministry and office.

"[6]Bible Translators Theologians This view is sometimes erroneously identified as consubstantiation in that it asserts the simultaneous presence of four essences in the Eucharist: the consecrated bread, the body of Christ, the consecrated wine, and the blood of Christ; but it differs in that it does not assert a "local" (three-dimensional, circumscribed) presence of the body and blood in the sacramental bread and wine respectively, which is rejected as "gross, carnal, and Capernaitic" in the Formula of Concord.

Lutherans, on the other hand, describe the Personal Union of the two natures in Christ (the divine and the human) as sharing their predicates or attributes more fully.

The Lutheran scholastics described the Reformed Christological position which leads to this doctrine as the extra calvinisticum, or "Calvinistic outside," because the Logos is thought to be outside or beyond the body of Christ.