If any of you are well versed in this art, I mean, if any of you can rightly make this distinction, he would deserve to be called a doctor of theology.  For Law and Gospel must be distinguished from each other.  The role of the Law is to terrify men, to drive them crazy and to despair – especially rude and vulgar people – until they realize they can do neither what the Law demands nor achieve God’s favor.  That will make them despair of themselves.  For they can never accomplish that goal – to obtain God’s favor by their own efforts – and keep the Law.  I recall when Dr. Staupitz said to me on a certain occasion: “More than a thousand times I have lied to God, promising that I would become godly.  But I never did what I promised.  I will never again resolve to become godly, for I see that I cannot carry out my resolution.  I want to quit lying to God.”  That was also my experience under the papacy: I was very anxious to become godly, but how long did it last?  Until I had finished reading the Mass.  An hour later I was more evil than before.  This state of affairs goes on and on until a person becomes quite weary and is forced to say, ” I have had it up to here with being godly according to Moses and the Law.  I am going to follow another Preacher, who says to me, ‘Come to Me, if you labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ ” ….

This Preacher does not teach that you can love God or that you must act and live a certain way.  Rather, He tells you how to be godly in God’s eyes and how to be saved, despite the fact that you cannot do as you should.  This kind of preaching is wholly different from the teaching of the Law of Moses, which deals only with works.  The Law says, “You shall not sin….Go and be godly….Do this, do that….” But Christ says, “Accept the fact that you are not godly.  But I have been godly in your stead.”

Quoted in Walther, C.F.W., Law and Gospel: How to Read and Apply the Bible.  St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2010, p. 27-28.  Cf. Luther’s Works: American Edition, Volume 23:271-73.

From a search on the Internet I am unable to find exactly where in Luther’s works this quote comes from.  Luther did say “We are all beggars; this is true.”  These were his last written words.  But the phrase “beggars telling other beggars where to find bread” is not quite consistent with what Luther taught about how the Gospel comes to us.  Phillip Cary puts it quite nicely in his paper “Why Luther is Not Quite Protestant“:

For Luther the Gospel is not, as the old Protestant saw has it, like one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread. That would mean the minister’s job is to instruct people in how to meet the conditions necessary for salvation—how to get from here to where the true bread is.  Instead, for Luther the Gospel is one beggar simply giving another beggar the bread of life, which of course is exactly what happens whenever Christ’s body is distributed in the sacrament.

Interestingly enough, it is seems more likely that the actual quote comes from the 20th century Methodist minister and missionary D.T. Niles.  After scouring Google for a context for this quote by Niles, this is the closest thing I came to, found at this blog (I was still unable to find any sort of reference after slogging through ten Google search pages of “Confucius say”-type quotations):

A Christian witness is not like a rich man who has a lot of bread which he hands out to the poor beggars who have nothing. He is rather like one beggar who tells another beggar where he has found bread.

My theory is that somehow Luther’s statement “We are all beggars” got mixed together with D.T. Niles’ statement and the latter wound up mistakenly attributed to Luther.  It just shows the importance of checking one’s sources for accuracy.

Now Scripture sets forth two kinds of teaching – Law and Gospel.  The Law, in condemning sins and setting forth the gravest threats of God, is that hammer (Jer. 23:29) through which God breaks rocks, that is crushes the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humbles it, so that truly and earnestly acknowledging the multitude and magnitude of sins and of the wrath of God over sin, the mind begins to hate and detest sin, to fear the wrath and judgment of God so that it is unwilling to perish eternally under them but sighs and struggles with groaning that it may be freed from them.  There the Law indeed has and sets forth promises of life, but on condition of perfect fulfillment …. the Gospel, however, teaches that what was impossible for the Law on account of the flesh, God provided by sending His Son (Rom. 8:3).  Therefore it shows Christ, the Lamb of God, born under the Law for us, in order that He might make satisfaction to the judgment of God, revealed in the Law, by His obedience and suffering on our behalf.  This Mediator the Father sets before us in the Gospel as a propitiation by faith in His blood through the remission of sins (Rom. 3:25).  “For this is the will of the Father, that everyone who believes in the Son should not perish but have eternal life” (John 6:40).  Thus the Gospel proclaims, offers and sets before contrite and terrified consciences the grace of God, reconciliation and remission of sins freely on account of the merit of Christ; and it is His will that everyone should lay hold of and apply this benefit of the Mediator to himself.  The ministry of private absolution applies this general promise of the Gospel to the penitent individually, in order that faith may be able to state all the more firmly that the benefits of the passion of Christ are certainly given and applied to it.  Moreover, in the use of the Lord’s Supper, Christ offers, applies, and seals, to all who receive it in faith, the New Testament with the precious pledges of His body and blood, namely, that God wants to be gracious with respect to our sins and to remember our iniquities no more.

From the Treasury of Daily Prayer, Concordia Publishing House, 2008, pp. 902-903.

-Pastor Jonathan Fisk, Worldview Everlasting 9/3/10

Do this, whenever you drink it, said Jesus the night of His betrayal, in remembrance of me. And we, like Israelite children before us, ask: “What is the meaning of this service?”  Is it simply kneeling at the Communion rail and thinking back about the deliverance God won for us at Calvary?  Is it digging into our memory for an event out of past?  Is it remembering Jesus, as we would reminisce about a departed loved one?  What, really, is the meaning of the Communion rite?

Here Jesus helps us out.  Take and eat; this is my body, He says of the Communion bread.  And regarding the Communion wine, He says: Drink of it, all of you.  For this is My blood of the last will and testament, which is being poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins (Matt. 26:26-28 NET).  This is no mere exercise in memory recall.  This is the real thing.  This eating and drinking is the meal of our deliverance.

As it was in the Passover, so it is in the Holy Supper.  Time and space are transcended.  Israel was delivered from bondage in Egypt only once; and yet the annual Passover was its repeated participation in that climactic deliverance.  So too, Jesus gave His body and shed His blood only once on the cross.  And yet in His holy meal He distributes that very same body and blood again and again for us Christians to eat and drink.  Do this, invites Jesus, in remembrance of me (1 Cor. 11:24).

In remembrance of me cuts in two directions.  In this sacramental eating and drinking we remember Jesus, and He also remembers us.  At the center of this remembering is the very body and blood once given for the forgiveness of sins.  The “remembrance” in this meal is far more than just a memory exercise!

For this sacred meal is a living memorial in two distinct and yet inseparable ways.  In this supper we continually recall our redemption.  It is the sign of our deliverance from certain death as we eat the body of the true Lamb of God who takes away our sins.  Yet in this holy meal God the Father also remembers the new testament in the blood of His Son, the sign and seal of His redeeming love.  This testament stands forever sure, founded on the incarnate body and blood of the Son of God.  In His instructions, Jesus Christ Himself points out for His church the benefit of this eating and drinking: given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.

In this supper Jesus preaches a powerful sermon for us.  Each time we eat and drink His body and blood once given and shed we participate in all the benefits He earned for us on His cross.  Here the forgiveness of sins is personally applied.  Not only did Jesus die for the sins of all the world, but in this sacred meal through His called servants He hands us the actual body and blood He once gave and says, for you for the forgiveness of sins.

This is a powerful public testimony.  It is personal testimony, direct from God, addressed personally to us.  This Sacrament offers, gives, and seals the same forgiveness as a Gospel sermon.  The difference is that in the eating and drinking it’s applied to us individually and personally: for you for the remission of sins. And sometimes a personal address makes all the difference in the world.  Think for a minute which kind of mail you prefer; a third-class flyer addressed to “occupant” or a first-class letter with your name on it?

Our living Lord hasn’t left anything to chance.  Because we are inclined to doubt the forgiveness of our sins, Jesus presents us with the tangible results of His death on our behalf.  Just as a canceled check is evidence of purchase, so His body once broken and His blood once shed is the sign of sins forgiven.  Under the bread and wine of His Holy Supper, Jesus Christ hands us the sign of our deliverance from sin and death.  Take eat, He says, … my body given for you….the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins (Luke 22:19, Matt. 26:28). Here there is encouragement for faith.  Here there is reason to rejoice.  For this is the meal of our deliverance in the forgiveness of our sins.

- From Dying to Live: The Power of Forgiveness by Harold L. Senkbeil, Concordia Publishing House, 1994, pp. 97-99.

We Christians should know that if God is not in the scale to give it weight, we, on our side, sink to the ground.  I mean it this way: if it cannot be said that God died for us, but only a man, we are lost; but if God’s death and a dead God lie in the balance, His side goes down and ours goes up like a light and empty scale.  Yet He can also readily go up again, or leap out of the scale!  But He could not sit on the scale unless He become a man like us, so that it could be called God’s dying, God’s martyrdom, God’s blood, and God’s death.  For God in His own nature cannot die; but now that God and man are united in one person, it is called God’s death when the man dies who is one substance or one person with God.

From Luther’s Works, American Edition 41:103-4, quoted in Formula of Concord SD VIII:44.

…the religious history of the late-colonial period, particularly the Great Awakening and its effects….is a story of unintended consequences.  Leaders of the Awakening – from Jonathan Edwards in Northampton, Massachusetts, Joseph Bellamy in rural Connecticut, Gilbert Tennent in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Samuel Davies in Virginia, to George Whitefield, who went everywhere – knew what they were after when they enlisted affective rhetoric to preach about intractable human depravity and supernal divine grace.  They were trying to reawaken the church for the sake of the church itself, to reassert the sovereignty of God’s divine love in conversion, to exalt the substitutionary, penal work of Christ as God’s way of reconciliation with sinners, to demonstrate the necessity of conversion as a prerequisite for truly virtuous living, and by these means to check the worldliness promoted by the era’s new forms of commerce and entertainment.  Yet the pursuit of such goals had ironic consequences.  The awakeners preached a higher, more spiritual vision of the church, yet the result was decline in the very notion of church and a transfer of religious commitment from the church to the nation.  They focused on God’s role in conversion yet brought about an exaltation of human activity in the process of salvation.  They preached a traditional doctrine of the atonement yet opened the way toward redefining the work of Christ as an outworking of governmental relationships rather than the assuagement of God’s wrath.  They rooted true virtue in supernatural conversion yet created conditions for a new concept of virtuous living as in principle available to every person by nature alone.

From Mark A. Noll, America’s God, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 13-14.

The Sacrament is a sign, but at the same time it is more.  It conveys to us God’s grace.  That is what Luther had learned in his fight against the ‘sacramentarians’: only in the Real Presence of the true body and blood of Christ do we have that assurance which the Lord’s Supper gives us.  Luther himself never doubted this Presence.  It was the silent presupposition of everything which he had said in his early writings on the Sacrament as a sign and seal attached to Christ’s promise.  He had seen then where the figurative understanding of the sacramental words was bound to lead.  If ‘This is my body’, ‘This is my blood’ were understood figuratively, then there would be no assurance that ‘given for you’, ‘shed for you’ were to be taken literally.  Then the proprium of this Sacrament would be lost, the eating and drinking of what Christ had sacrificed for us, and with it the Real Presence of the whole Christ, according to his divinity and humanity, in his Church on earth, here and now, as an anticipation of our eternal union with him.  No one who knows Luther can assume that he would have been satisfied with Calvin’s doctrine, which, in spite of all realistic language, did not admit of more than that spiritual manducation which all Reformed churches teach.

From This Is My Body by Hermann Sasse, Augsburg Publishing House, 1959, p. 267.

Just as the truth of this divine promise [baptism], once pronounced over us, continues until death, so our faith in it ought never to cease, but to be nourished and strengthened until death by the continual remembrance of this promise made to us in baptism.  Therefore, when we rise from our sins or repent, we are merely returning to the power and the faith of baptism from which we fell, and finding our way back to the promise then made to us, which we deserted when we sinned.  For the truth of the promise once made remains steadfast, always ready to receive us back with open arms when we return….

It will therefore be no small gain to a penitent to remember above all his baptism, and, confidently calling to mind the divine promise which he has forsaken, acknowledge that promise before his Lord, rejoicing that he is still within the fortress of salvation because he has been baptized, and abhorring his wicked ingratitude in falling away from its faith and truth.  His heart will find wonderful comfort and will be encouraged to hope for mercy when he considers that the promise which God made to him, which cannot possibly lie, is still unbroken and unchanged, and indeed, cannot be changed by sins, as Paul says (II Tim. 2[:13]: “If we are faithless, he remains faithful – for he cannot deny himself.”  This truth of God, I say, will sustain him, so that if all else should fail, this truth, if he believes in it, will not fail him.  In it the penitent has a shield against all assaults of the scornful enemy, an answer to the sins that disturb his conscience, an antidote for the dread of death and judgment, and a comfort in every temptation – namely, this one truth – when he says: “God is faithful in his promises [Heb. 10:23; 11:11] and I received his sign in baptism.  If God is for me, who is against me?” [Rom. 8:31].

From the Treasury of Daily Prayer, Concordia Publishing House, 2008, pp. 1166-1167.

While Zwingli's view of the Scriptures rests mainly on the doctrine of Augustine, a certain influence of Origen and his allegoric interpretation of the Bible is noticeable.  The clarity of the Bible, however, does not mean that everyone can understand it; the Scriptures are clear and intelligible to the faithful only.  Now, faith comes from the Word of God, but only if and when the Holy Spirit moves the human soul.  Such faith is the true master of a correct understanding of the Divine Word.  Thus, Zwingli, in spite of his Augustinian biblicism, recognizes something as higher than the letter of the Bible.

Here a strong contrast between Luther's and Zwingli's understanding of the Word becomes evident.  For Luther the content of the Word is bound up with the letter.  The Holy Spirit comes to us in the external word.  In Zwingli's opinion, the external word (the letter) in itself has no power over the human soul.

Not the content of the Word as such overpowers the soul by virtue of the Spirit that dwells in the Word, but the Spirit contacts the soul directly and thus enables the soul to understand the real meaning of the Word –

So Reinhold Seeberg puts it, and underlines the parallel existing between the understanding of the Word and the Sacrament.  According to Luther, the meaning of the sacramental words can be found in those words only, since they are the words of Christ and, therefore, words in which the Holy Spirit dwells.  For Zwingli they cannot be understood from the letter, but by the Spirit, who makes the believer understand the words when he compares Scripture with Scripture and asks for the analogy of faith (pp. 116, Revised Edition, emphasis mine).

So for Luther, God's words themselves convey the Holy Spirit, but for Zwingli, the Word may or may not be accompanied by the Spirit.  Not only does this work itself out in their radically different views on the Lord's Supper, but it seems also to have very serious implications for their respective theological descendants. This is an issue of certainty – how do I know the Holy Spirit is working in my life?

For Luther it was a no-brainer – the Holy Spirit is always accompanied by the Word, and the Word is never unaccompanied by the Holy Spirit.  The two are inseparable.  For Luther Baptism was efficacious because of the Word of God in and with the water, and where the Word of God is, there is the Holy Spirit.  We receive the true body and blood of Christ in the Lord's Supper because of the Words of Christ.  The Word of God creates what it says.  It is living and active because it is always accompanied by the Spirit.  The person him/herself may reject that Word, but the Spirit is always present in it.

For Zwingli and Calvin et al, however, this is not necessarily the case. One might hear the Word of God, but the Holy Spirit may or may not accompany it.  The Spirit is not necessarily in the Word, but works directly upon a person's heart.  So we cannot really know with certainty that the Holy Spirit is working when one hears the Word, is baptized, or receives the Lord's Supper. 

This is basically where non-Lutheran Protestantism finds itself.  The problem with this is the resulting subjectivity.  I can hear the Word being preached.  I can see a person being baptized.  I can taste the bread and the wine in the Lord's Supper.  I cannot see the Holy Spirit working directly on a person's heart.  

As a Lutheran, I know the Holy Spirit is working because the Word is being preached and the Sacraments are being administered according to Christ's command.  If the Holy Spirit is separated from the Word of God, how can one know with certainty the Holy Spirit is working?  Only through subjective, inward-looking means.  This is true whether one is Calvinist or Arminian.  It is true whether one is Pentecostal, evangelical or fundamentalist.  The precise nature of the navel-gazing may differ from group to group but it is still navel-gazing.