“I am very sad you don’t care for my labors in responding to you. It took me many, many hours to put that all together. Alas, you are free to do with it what you will. That is always a risk in these conversations, but one I accept willingly. I can say this, that I learned a great deal in my research, and so it was worth the trip.
I wish you well.
Peace,”
~ ~ ~
Now I am sad, you are a much better writer than I am but
it would take me too long to reply to every one of your
sentences, you see, it’s too much to answer. I can but
it ends up, the same old arguments.
I just want you to become Catholic but I would accept that you think about converting, change a bit, well, to be exact
and I am repeating, accept the most Holy Eucharist. Then, change about Mary and believe in Confession to a priest before the Great Warning. I am trying to help you prepare because you take the time to discuss. It means a lot.
I can handle a question or a doubt, misunderstanding in
one or two sentences.
For example, you show me in two sentences, a paragraph
even, where any Apostolic Father rejected Christ’s presence
in the Eucharist?
I did a little digging on Kevin Barrett, your fav non-Catholic prophet, and while I couldn’t find a lot about him at all, he does like to hang out at the Open Heaven forum, so I checked them out, and hoo boy do I not want to be associated with that group! Check it out...
http://www.letusreason.org/Latrain45.htm
These guys are so far from Sola Scriptura it isn’t funny. Latter Rain is a major source of error and spiritual deception, and the bottom line reason is they trust their own modern revelatory experiences, intuitions, and emotions, more than they trust the Bible.
As for the Eucharist, if we could all go back to how it was in the apostolic period and shortly thereafter, I’d be fine with that. There was no divinely sanctioned priesthood in the early church as there was in Israel. There was no worship of the physical elements of the Lord’s Supper, especially not under any theory even remotely like transubstantiation.
Just a gathering of simple believers in Jesus, who love Him in spirit and in truth, partaking of the prophetic symbols he left us of his great sacrifice, the bread and the wine, in remembrance of Him, just as He commanded us. There is no lack of love for God or for His Christ in any of that. Just true and faithful worship. And the Fathers testify of the same principle in the evidence you won’t consider.
But that’s not good enough for Trent. Trent requires the faithful believer to also subscribe to pagan Greek philosophy, looking to a weird inversion of Aristotle’s “substance versus accidence” categories as the way to invoke the literal physical presence of Christ in the elements, without affording the poor parishioner any evidence of the same, based on pure blind trust of a man who claims for himself the power to make this invisible miracle.
So please, I beg you, consider your recklessness in saying what Protestants believe about the Eucharist. You have us all wrong. You have wrapped the term “eucharist” in a meaning it didn’t have in the early days of the church, and even though I know you are well-intentioned, you damage the reputation of good people who love Jesus at least as much as you do, by suggesting we are somehow at odds with the Lord over His Supper.
You convict us without a trial, without even hearing the evidence, because the evidence, you say, is too lengthy. Is that judging with righteous judgment, as our Lord commanded? Would a real trial be conducted that way? I hope not.
But it is your choice. If and when you ever wish to look at the evidence, you can come back to this thread and review it at your leisure, or search out new evidence on your own. I long for the unity of the church too. But not at the expense of truth, and not at the word of prophets who can’t get it right, and whose prophecies, if believed, will lead many people into error.
Peace,
SR