Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Chemnitz

Chemnitz is doing theological surgery with a pastor's steadiness: he slices between what the bread is at rest and what it is in use, without letting either side claim total victory. The line is aimed at a high-stakes question of the Reformation era: when, exactly, does the Eucharistic bread count as Christ's body? Not in a vague, symbolic sense, but in a way that could justify adoration, reservation, and sacramental certainty.

The phrase "Nevertheless" gives away the polemical setting. He's correcting an argument he thinks is too blunt - likely a view that treats consecration as a magic moment when bread permanently changes, regardless of reception. Chemnitz insists the bread Christ breaks and offers is not "not the body" (double negative as a rhetorical guardrail), yet he refuses to let that reality float free from the act for which the sacrament exists: eating. "Becomes ... when the eating ... is begun" is a carefully calibrated hinge. It preserves real presence while tethering it to liturgical action, not priestly power or leftover objects.

The subtext is institutional as much as devotional. By anchoring the sacrament in use, Chemnitz undercuts practices like storing or parading the host as a quasi-independent holy thing, while still protecting the communicant from anxious scruples: the gift is real where Christ places it - in the giving and receiving. The repeated concrete verbs ("divided", "offered", "received") keep the argument from drifting into metaphysics. It's a theology that wants the drama of the altar to end at the table, not in the reliquary.