A Treatise Concerning the Blessed Sacrament and Concerning the Brotherhoods

In the closing weeks of 1519, Luther published three short German sermons on the sacraments, one each on penance, baptism, and the body of Christ. This treatise is the third of them. It was written not for scholars but for lay readers, at a moment when Luther was still a monk within the Roman church and had not yet attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation or the sacrificial character of the mass. The second half of its title points to the immediate occasion: the lay confraternities, or Bruderschaften, that flourished in German towns, pooling dues for masses on behalf of deceased members and marking their feast days with eating and drinking. Luther had watched these societies closely enough to be disgusted by them.

His method is the same in all three sermons. A sacrament has three parts: the outward sign, the thing the sign signifies, and the faith that lays hold of both. The sign here is bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ. The significance is fellowship, Gemeinschaft, and this is where the treatise spends its energy. To receive the sacrament is to be incorporated into Christ and into all the saints, so that what is theirs becomes ours and what is ours becomes theirs. Luther reaches for the old image, drawn from Augustine, of many grains ground into one loaf and many grapes pressed into one wine, each losing its own shape in order to become part of a single body. The practical consequence is an exchange of burdens. The sin, weakness, and fear of the communicant are carried by Christ and the whole church; in turn the communicant takes on the suffering of the neighbor. This is why Luther insists the sacrament is meant precisely for the troubled and the weak, and why he complains about those who approach it only once a year under compulsion. Faith is the third part: the sacrament is received by the one who believes that this fellowship is being given, and without such faith the outward eating accomplishes nothing. Along the way he states that it would be good for a general council to restore the cup to the laity, a remark that Duke George of Saxony promptly protested to Elector Frederick. The treatise then turns on the brotherhoods. Luther finds in them a counterfeit of the one true brotherhood of the sacrament, a society of gluttony and self-congratulation that treats membership as spiritual credit. If people must have such fellowships, he says, let them gather to pray, collect money, and feed the poor.

The work matters because it shows Luther's eucharistic thinking before the polemics of 1520 hardened it. The emphasis on communion as mutual bearing of burdens, rather than on the mode of Christ's presence, is an emphasis later Protestant debate would nearly bury, and recovering it has been one reason readers continue to return here.

Who should read this: those who want Luther on the Lord's Supper as consolation and shared life rather than as controversy, and pastors thinking about what a congregation actually owes one another. It is not the place to look for Luther's mature sacramental doctrine or for an argument about real presence; for that, go to The Babylonian Captivity of the Church and the writings of the later 1520s.