RESPONSIO.

Selneccer confuses the two meanings. Furthermore, what was said by us after Vigil Vigilius of Thapsus, the holy martyr of God and orthodox writer, that the Body of Christ itself is as removed from us in the Supper as heaven itself is from the earth, must be understood only regarding the bodily presence or essential conjunction and assistance of Christ’s flesh with the earthly signs: not that we exclude every presence of Christ's flesh from the Supper. Therefore, just as Selneccer confuses the sign with the thing signified in the naming of the body of Christ, so he also disturbs in this place those modes of presence (by which the sign and the thing signified are present in the Sacraments in a different way). For the signs are indeed present in the Lord's Supper by bodily presence: but the thing signified, that is, the body of Christ itself and its essential body, is absent from the signs of the Supper by bodily presence, but is present to us by sacramental signification (with which a special efficacy and spiritual communication of the signified things coheres). Nor does it follow that if the body of Christ itself is truly present to us who believe in the holy Supper, it is therefore present to the signs themselves sōmatikē parousia by bodily presence. For the flesh of Christ is present in the sacraments in such a way, as in Baptism and as in the Word, namely schetikē by relation, not sōmatikē by body; energētikē by operation, not ousiōdei by essence presence. Those who either confuse these dissimilar modes of presence or do not understand them, as Selneccer confuses them in this place, must confess that they have not yet learned the true nature of the sacraments.