An Opposing View

We don't really know what the website Opposing Views is or means to be, but it has run a series of brief and badly-written essays on Lutheranism.  They keep showing up in our Google news feed, and we keep ignoring them.  But enough is enough.

In a comparison of Lutheranism and Methodism, OV writer Brian Gabriel wrote:

In keeping with traditional Catholic belief, Lutherans have a literal interpretation of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, or communion. They believe that the sacrament of baptism in itself forgives people's sins and, like Catholics, they believe in the doctrine of transubstantiation – the literal transformation of the bread into Christ's body during the Eucharist. Methodists view baptism and the Eucharist as symbols of inner spiritual experience.

Given the times, we suspect that a lot of state-school  undergraduates will wind up wishing that they had plagiarized from some other source, as this is the kind of boner that will cost them a full letter grade on their Intro to World Civ paper.

To simply have said that we share with Roman Catholics an abiding faith in the reality of Christ's Eucharistic presence would have been accurate; it would have been natural for anyone acquainted with the subject to have added that, unlike our Papist cousins, we take no position on the means by which that presence is achieved.

Oh, well.  At least these morons aren't filling anybody's head with that nonsense about a Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation.  That one makes steam come out of our ears.