The Eucharist of Jesus Christ

The Gospel of John, Chapter Six, The Holy Bible ^ | October 2, AD 2002 | the_doc

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

The Eucharist of Christ

The following is a consideration of John chapter 6, with regard to the Roman and Protestant arguments thereupon. It was originally composed as a Response to a Roman argument on a prior “Eucharist” thread; however, due to the length and theological depth of the Essay, it is being Posted as a stand-alone Article

John 6:30-66 -- They said therefore unto him, What sign shewest thou then, that we may see, and believe thee? what dost thou work? Our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world. Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst. But I said unto you, That ye also have seen me, and believe not. All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of him that sent me, that every one which seeth the Son, and believeth on him, may have everlasting life: and I will raise him up at the last day. The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, I am the bread which came down from heaven. And they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? how is it then that he saith, I came down from heaven? Jesus therefore answered and said unto them, Murmur not among yourselves. No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God. Every man therefore that hath heard, and hath learned of the Father, cometh unto me. Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever. These things said he in the synagogue, as he taught in Capernaum. Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you? What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him. And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father. From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.

It has been said of Protestants:

You're in agreement with all those who also walked away from Him in John Chapter 6. You Protestants love to take scripture literally when it suits you, and symbolically when it doesn't

No, it isn't that simple. There is a lot more in the passage than you have noticed.

I don't know about all "Protestants" in our day, but I am only interested in what a given passage really means. I try not to make the mistake of interpreting a literal passage as merely symbolic; by the same token, I try not to make the mistake which very often proves to be even worse (for several reasons, perhaps!)--which is to interpret a completely metaphorical idea literally!

With regard to your charge that Protestants are exemplified by the unbelievers mentioned in John 6:60 and 66, let me say that you are badly mixed up as to who those folks really were in that verse. You have presumed that the people who walked away from the Lord in John 6:66 "realized" at some level of their souls that Christ was "surely" talking about somehow eating and drinking His literal flesh and His literal blood--and that these unbelieving folks wanted no part of that! But you are just reading your own pro-RCC, anti-Protestant presuppositions into the text. You can't even begin to prove your position. Your whole approach is hermeneutically improper (translate that as "dishonest").

Granted, some of the unbelievers mentioned in vv.60 and 66 may very well have had a notion that the Lord was talking about eating and drinking His literal flesh and literal blood. But that's altogether different from what you insinuated. And since you can't rule out the scenario I am now proposing, you Romanists are suddenly discovered to be skating on very thin theological ice!

Please be sure you understand what I am saying: the people who could not continue with Christ may have been the ones who thought He was teaching some kind of variation on your basic position. If that is the correct interpretive scenario, then the fact of their apostasy would by no means support your position. It would actually fit the Protestant position beautifully.

So, everything in this doctrinal/interpretive case boils down to something which you didn't honestly face in your post accusing us Protestants. I am referring to the "minor" matter of what the Lord actually meant (and what He did not mean, of course) in vv.48-58! (You see, you just defined the Romanists as the believers in John 6 and the Protestants as the unbelievers. You can't just arbitrarily do that. You need to look more carefully at John 6.)

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IN THIS SERIES OF SEVEN CONSECUTIVE POSTS, I will show you what the Lord meant in John 6:48-58.

If you find yourself angry at what you are reading in these posts, you need to keep in mind that I am rather calmly responding to the insinuation that John 6 condemns us Protestants. You have managed to get everything backwards, and I am trying to help you get this stuff straightened out. If I wind up making you angry, it will be because I am a fairly clear communicator telling you the Truth which you don't want to hear, not because I am wrong.

Furthermore, if you do get angry, it will not be because I am rude in my presentation. The fact is, I will be careful to show considerable rhetorical restraint even as we cover painfully difficult matters.

Having said that, I do feel the need to warn you again that I propose to be completely clear in my Scriptural defense against your insinuations. And that does pose a problem if you are going to attack us Protestants and then expect us to respond in a strictly vague way just to avoid offending you. I have given a great deal of thought to this, and I have concluded that I need to follow historical precedents which some Romanists will find irksome.

Allow me to illustrate: The Romanists on this thread have already admitted that the transubstantiation position has been labeled by its detractors as "cannibalism" since the early days of the Church of Rome and was labeled as "hocus-pocus" by the Protestant Reformers. These are certainly not the Romanists' preferred terms for transubstantiation, but they do crystallize the Protestants' theological objections, objections which I am duty-bound to keep more or less in front of you.

I will not use the terms as gratuitous insults, but I don't see how we can reasonably avoid certain unpleasant historical terms in the context of a truly serious discussion of this matter. Even as I am trying not to be counterproductively inflammatory, I need to be clear in my defense of the Protestant position. Remember: You have charged us Protestants with unbelief concerning your doctrine of transubstantiation. Well, I will stipulate that we do not believe what you believe. We do regard your position as completely false. And we can disprove your position from the Scriptures.

That, in turn, would make the doctrine of transubstantiation a matter of cannibalistic hocus-pocus, would it not? Of course it would.

Do you see my dilemma here? I have no desire to be unnecessarily inflammatory. The problem is, the Scriptures are on my side -- completely so. In this series of posts, I will show you what I mean.

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***Observation 1: BACKGROUND PERSPECTIVE

The first thing you need to realize (or remember, if you already realize this) is that I am an absolute predestinarian. (All of the Protestant Reformers, certainly including Luther and Calvin, were predestinarians. Calvin was the strongest spokesman for the predestinarian position, and he drew more doctrinal fire over this doctrine than did Luther. However, Luther is the one who first commented that the controversy over man's free will was the pivotal doctrine of the entire Reformation.)

You will never understand where I am coming from in these posts unless and until you understand the fact of my predestinarian perspective.

I believe that the Bible is clear in asserting a doctrine of "double predestination." God will save His elect, who are predestined to heaven. But many -- perhaps most -- people are reprobate. Many people are predestined to hell. And this awful predestination merely gives fallen sinners what they deserve.

Augustine clearly saw these ominous truths in the Bible. He could even be called a proto-Calvinist. It is definitely worth reading Augustine's writings on this topic of "double predestination." (Alas, I have discovered that it is not worth reading the RCC's summaries of Augustine concerning this doctrine. The RCC consistently misrepresents what Augustine was saying. Rome's apologists have done this for almost five centuries. No kidding. Read Augustine's writings, not those who "interpret" his writings.)

Now, if many or even most people are predestined to hell, this requires that there be a devil. (God is not the author of sin!) Furthermore, God's devil has been given broad powers.

(Notice from this that I am rejecting the very common heresy of dualism. In an odd but undeniable way, the devil really is God's devil. We see this in 2 Thessalonians 2:11.)

God has even ordained that the devil be "the god of this world" after the Fall. Lost sinners are enslaved in a demonic deception as a punishment for their seminal participation in the Fall (see Augustine again!). When God breaks through that deception, He does so deliberately and selectively. God deliberately withholds the spiritual means of true conversion from the non-elect. This seals their justly deserved doom. They get what they wanted. They wanted Satan in Adam, and they are now stuck with Satan in a mess of Adamic-Satanic idolatry.

(Again, you really ought to read Augustine on this topic. Most of his writings on predestination are Scripturally solid. And being Scripturally solid is what matters! The Protestant Reformers repeatedly embarrassed Rome by quoting Augustine's Scriptural teachings on the doctrine of predestination, including the doctrine of God's awful reprobation of non-elect sinners.)

Notice that God's predestination of sinners unto hell involves what necessarily amounts to religious deception. Some fools are more religious; some are less religious. But religious deception is an awful, even pervasive problem. That definitely includes deceptions within professing Christianity. The Lord Jesus Himself issued several warnings about antichrists who would come in the Church age.

What are we to do about this? The answer is simple. We follow Sola Scriptura. We don’t follow Calvin. We don’t follow Augustine. And we don't trust your Pope, either. (Pardon me, but we Protestants definitely do think that would be like letting the fox guard the henhouse.)

What I am saying is that the spiritual reality which the Bible itself presents to us ultimately demands the Sola Scriptura approach. The Scriptures are our necessary and sufficient refuge (2 Timothy 3:16).

Today's Romanists will not, indeed, cannot appreciate this perspective--so long as they are determined to remain Romanists, that is. The problem is, Romanists have been taught only to scoff at Sola Scriptura-- so, if they are faithful to Rome, they will scoff at it.

This is reflexive with Romanists. But I say that this is because they are stuck in the very mess which the Protestants' Sola Scriptura perspective is concerned to address. I am persuaded that my Romanist friends have gotten themselves badly deceived. (Alas, the deception is so bad that they get exceedingly angry if I clearly tell them what I believe has been going on with them. In the predestination of God, that anger on the part of my Romanist friends is part of the deception.)

It is beyond the scope of this post to go into the myriad reasons why I say that the RCC is actually antichristian, but I do have my reasons. (The problem is, some of the thread monitors will not allow historic Protestants to present most of our really weighty Scriptural arguments against Romanism. The matter of whether our Protestant arguments happen to be correct seems to be lost on them. The fact that we historic Protestants do not hit the abuse button even when Romanists are publicly trashing us without any Scriptural basis also seems to be lost on a few of them.) Suffice it to say that I regard Romanism as illegitimate and that I have plenty of Scriptural reasons for this.

On the other hand, I believe that it is important for me to affirm that Romanism has not always been incompatible with Biblical Christianity. Some of the errors which I have personally noticed in Romanism started in the earliest days of the RCC. As it turns out, these were not necessarily fatal errors. (Although a substantial number of Christians flatly refused to be part of the RCC from the very beginning, it would be presumptuous for historic Protestants to say that there were no true Christians who were aligned with Rome.) Unfortunately, things got much, much worse over time -- murderously so, in fact. Finally, in the 16th Century, the Protestant Reformers pulled another huge population of Christians out of Rome. These folks realized that they wanted no part of what the RCC had become.

A lot of them were murdered for their trouble, of course.

Martin Luther was especially grieved to leave his formerly beloved Church of Rome, but he felt that he had to very clearly condemn the RCC in his Ninety-Five Theses. He felt that the RCC had become an empty shell, that the Spirit of God had departed from the RCC and written "Ichabod" over its door.

Now that the Protestant option exists as a credible option for Christians, most of us historic Protestants do not fall all over ourselves making apologies for professing Christians who choose to continue in Romanism. The RCC is a gigantic mess -- obviously so. (See [link here].) And when we compare testimonial notes with today's Romanists, we discover that the spiritual experiences of the typical Romanist really are different from those of us in the Reformed tradition. So, if there are true Christians left within Romanism, we argue (vigorously!) that they need to get out of it. And we frankly believe that God's elect will not remain indefinitely within Romanism.

Again, the Lord God is in absolutely perfect, absolutely complete control of the destinies of all things and the salvation or damnation of all souls. In this background discussion, I have not bothered to prove this predestinarian position. My reason is very, very simple: I will prove it from John 6!

And you will discover from my exposition of John 6 that the doctrine of predestination is more than just a perspective which emboldens us Protestants to oppose the Papacy as apostate. It turns out that the doctrine of God's predestinating sovereignty in election and reprobation is actually a strangely funny part of our Scriptural disproof of your doctrine of transubstantiation.

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***Observation 2: The nominal disciples who assumed that the Lord was speaking in some literal way in John 6 were wickedly confused

In John 6:31-58, the Lord used a kind of extended metaphor.

The entire passage is a development of the idea of the "bread of heaven." It is a lengthy exposition of the typology of the manna of the Old Testament. This is the first -- and most obvious -- reason why we have to regard the passage as metaphorical. (The passage is typological -- and types are special kinds of metaphors!)

I realize that diehard Romanists will not be impressed by that argument, but it is correct. I will prove that the nominal disciples who assumed that the Lord was speaking in some literal way in vv.48-58 were just wickedly confused.

The main confusion centers on vv.48-58, but as I indicated above, we need to realize that the metaphor (with an associated confusion!) did not start there. The Lord started off His extended metaphor by presenting the "Bread of Heaven" idea as an elaboration on the manna metaphor (that is, the manna as a type of Christ). The funny thing is, some of His "followers" got very quickly confused.

In v.52 of our text, we see that in a group of folks which included some lost religionists (and that's important!), a number of people thought that He was talking about literally eating His literal flesh. Were these folks right? Of course not. These lost Religionists were confused.

To appreciate why I say this, go back and look at what the Lord had been saying before v.52.

Verses 22-27. In v.22, the Lord had just finished feeding five thousand people by the miracle which included providing physical bread for their physical needs. In v.23, the bread was specifically mentioned. In v.26, when a multitude of people caught up with Him again, He rebuked them for their carnality. Their entire attitude was wrong. They were worldly in their thinking. They definitely tended to think of literal feeding as important, but compared to man's need of spiritual life, it means nothing!

This suggests that the miracle of providing folks with literal bread -- identified as it is with material life -- was actually designed to illustrate their need for the things of spiritual life. After all, this Man Who used a spectacular miracle to feed them was obviously from God. Somehow He had come down from Heaven to live with men! Shouldn't they have asked Him for spiritual life?

Well, they did no such thing. The Lord had to bring up the matter Himself (v.27). It never dawned on His strictly nominal followers Who they were talking to. These folks had no discernment whatsoever. They were talking to their Own Creator God and cared for nothing He was really saying -- or, more to the point of this discussion, nothing He really meant. (Their refusal to pay close spiritual attention to the Lord will become more obvious later in our discussion.)

Verses 27-30. In v.27, the Lord Jesus said "Do not work for food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life." Notice that the Lord chose to call this "work," because we have to exert ourselves to obtain food. The Jews then asked what work they should do for eternal life. The Lord answered that the necessary work of God (!) is to "believe in Him Whom He [God] has sent."

NOW, notice that faith in Christ is something which unregenerate sinners natively lack -- because, by definition, they do not have the Spirit of God working faith in their souls! And this is what we see in our text. Here they are, standing in the very Presence of the God-man who had performed one of the greatest miracles in Biblical history, and yet in v.30 they asked for a sign to establish Jesus's credentials as coming from God!

This certainly angered Jesus, even if the text does not explicitly tell us so. (Elsewhere in the Scriptures, He pronounces this "sign-seeking" attitude wicked and adulterous!)

These people whom the Lord was addressing were a bunch of disrespectful spiritual boneheads. This is not even arguable. They did not pay sufficient heed to His supernatural Power when He had been pleased to use it; they were peculiarly interested in the carnal benefits of following Him; they did not initiate sober inquiries concerning spiritual life; and they tempted God by seeking signs! They had an all-around bad attitude. (They were unreasonable and ungodly!)

To use the language of the Apostle Paul, they had their own bellies as their gods (Philippians 3:19). And although they were not literal cannibals, they were as spiritually stupid as cannibals are -- because they were just as lost as cannibals are.

Verses 31-36. In this part of the passage, the Lord began expounding an Old Testament symbol and was obviously using the language of the symbol itself. That being the case, we have to say that He was being metaphorical in vv.31-35.

But again, we have to remember that the Lord was talking to carnal boneheads. They were not on the Lord's spiritual wavelength at all. They were on an unholy wavelength. The fact is, they were spiritually dead. When they indicated in v.34 that they did want the Bread of God which the Lord had mentioned in v.33, He bluntly pronounced them unbelievers (v.36).

This means that they still did not understand what He was talking about. They had both the confusion of unbelief and the unbelief of confusion.

Verses 49-51. In v.49, He said "Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died." If we amplify the ideas in the typology, it becomes "Your fathers literally/physically/materially ate this literal/physical/material food, this manna, in the wilderness, and they [still] died literally/physically/materially." Next, notice that in vv.50-51, He said that if anyone eats that bread which is the Lord Himself, he shall not die.

It is obvious that v.51 is being contrasted with v.49. The Lord's rhetorical strategy is seen in the fact that the issues in v.49 were literal/physical/material, whereas in v.51 they are not. The Lord obviously isn't literal bread, and it is equally obvious that He can't be talking in vv.50-51 about exempting us from physical/material death. By a simple extension of this pattern, the feeding idea to which He refers in v.50-51 is not literal, either.

The obviously non-literal feeding idea is just a metaphor for the assimilation of spiritual verities into the soul. (But remember that the Lord is talking to spiritual boneheads. Most of His audience had no more discernment than a cannibal does. The funny thing is, cannibals do have a doctrine which maintains that the spiritual virtues of one's enemy may be acquired by literally eating his flesh!)

My point is that an unregenerate sinner would not fully grasp what the Lord was saying in this passage. The metaphors which Christ chose to use would not help them. On the contrary, the metaphors would just leave them stuck in their ungodly confusion.

Well, the metaphors don't pose any such problems for me. It is patently obvious to me that vv.48-58 are not to be taken literally. That, in turn, argues that the RCC's doctrine of transubstantiation is just a superstition of pagans which has crept into professing Christianity.

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***Observation 3: other Biblical examples of the idea of the Word of God as bread

Is there any other direct Scriptural evidence that my reading of the passage is correct? You bet there is! One of the best ways to show this is to look at other Biblical examples of the idea of the Word of God as bread.

One of the most important of these is the statement Christ made when Satan came to Him during a forty-day fast. In that famous temptation, Satan urged Him to go ahead and eat. Christ replied "It is written: Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God" (Matthew 4:4).

It is important for us to realize that the Lord's reply to Satan was taken directly from Deuteronomy 8:3, in which Moses referred directly to God's feeding of people with manna! Deuteronomy 8:3 presents the idea of one's spiritual priorities. Man needs to feed spiritually on everything God says. Notice that the gastrointestinal tract is not at issue even if Satan wanted to make it the issue. The Lord's very manner of deflecting the temptation proves this. The Lord borrowed the feeding idea from the Old Testament to make a sharp contrast. He used the idea of literal hunger and literal feeding to talk about the spiritual hunger which we should have and should satisfy from the Scriptures, not from pagan superstitions.

So, in Matthew 4:4, Satan was trying to confuse the issue of what is important. And Satan is the arch-demon of paganism, of course. (Again, it is pagan to confuse literal feeding with spiritual feeding.)

Another good example of this idea of God's Scriptures as spiritual food is seen in the statement of Job "I have esteemed the words of His mouth more than my necessary food" (Job 23:12) This is the idea of Deuteronomy 8:3 again. It is the idea of Matthew 4:4. Job mentions the idea of literal food -- but only to underscore the amazingly important fact that God's Word is non-literal food. (Again, faith is a feeding which has nothing to do with stuffing something in the top opening of one's gastrointestinal tract. Job is clearly telling us this.)

Interestingly, the Book of Job is apparently the oldest book of the Bible; the symbolism of the manna would come later. But Job's understanding of the spiritual dimensions of salvation confirms that the manna of the Old Testament was a symbol of faith, not a prophetic allusion to "transubstantiation."

Another good example is found in the story of Ezekiel, who was told in Ezekiel 3:1 to eat the scroll which God had given him. Did this entail a literal eating? You bet it did! But was this peculiar gastronomic episode telling us that God was going to institute transubstantiation in the New Covenant? Of course not.

Ezekiel 3:1 is ultimately presenting the same metaphor which Job 23:12 and Deuteronomy 8:3 and Matthew 4:4 are using. We need to be filled with the special-revelatory truth of God, not some pagan counterfeit thereof. And this spiritual filling is, of course, not gastronomic. (Only the symbol in Ezekiel 3 is gastronomic. So, don't confuse the symbol and the thing it symbolizes and call this wisdom. You really could wind up with cannibalism masquerading as Christianity.)

For that matter, Christ used the word leaven -- certainly a word identified with bread -- in more than one instance in the New Testament and used it only metaphorically. The funny thing is, we have recorded for us at least one instance in which even the inner circle of disciples wrongly concluded that He was speaking literally. Christ rebuked them for behaving as hyper-literal nitwits.

Moving away from the ideas of bread and leaven, I know of at least two more Biblical-theological reasons why the Lord might have wanted to use a feeding metaphor in His New Testament discussion of saving faith. The first of these was the fact that the Fall occurred as a crime of a literal feeding at a literal tree at the urging of a literal serpent hanging from the boughs of that literal tree. The Atonement, by contrast, is appropriated through the obedience of "feeding" at a non-literal tree (the Cross of Christ) at the urging of a non-literal serpent (Christ as the imputatively accursed One) as He would be visualized in the gospel hanging from that non-literal tree!

Notice the parallels. These are some of the well-recognized parallels between the Fall and the Atonement. (Paul noticed such parallels.) But we need to notice the reversals as we move from the type to the antitype. (As Paul said in Romans 5, the Atonement is unlike the Fall -- parallels or not.) What I mean is that the "literals" which I highlighted become "non-literals" as we move from the Fall to the Atonement. This, in turn, suggests that the disobedience of a literal feeding is replaced by the obedience of a non-literal feeding.

Perhaps an even better argument against the Romanist doctrine of transubstantiation is seen in the fact that the Passover lamb was to be eaten--but, my goodness, it was a literal lamb, of course! The Passover lamb for each household had symbolic merits which had to be symbolically appropriated, i.e., symbolically assimilated by the ritual of feeding upon the lamb.

To finish this particular argument, I will now pose the obvious question: Does the fact that the Passover lamb was to be literally devoured mean that Christ is to be literally devoured? Of course not. The very idea is spiritually revolting. It would also be a violation of the interpretive pattern set out for us in the Book of Hebrews.

As I pointed out earlier, the type symbolizes the antitype. The Book of Hebrews points out something inherent in Biblical symbolism: the type invariably proves to be spiritually inferior to the antitype. Therefore, we should assume that the literal feeding on the Passover lamb anticipates and is replaced by a strictly spiritual feeding on the Lamb of God -- i.e., the non-literal feeding which is simply spirit-sustaining faith in Christ.

In other words, the lamb of the Old Testament Passover was a literal lamb to be literally devoured, but the Lord Jesus is not a literal lamb -- never mind that He is the metaphorical Lamb of God -- so it is spiritually crazy to conclude that He is to be literally devoured. We literally eat literal lambs, but we don’t literally eat the non-literal Lamb -- who happens to be a human being, of course! -- unless we are unrepentant cannibals after all.

In short, the entire Bible militates against the literal reading of John 6:48-58. The passage in John's Gospel is just using the spiritual metaphor which is found throughout the Bible.

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***Observation 4: there are no other passages which teach transubstantiation

At this point, a diehard Romanist -- who presupposes that the RCC position is the correct interpretation of Scripture no matter what I can demonstrate from the Scriptures -- would probably say "But there are other passages which definitely are teaching transubstantiation!"

But nothing could be further from the truth. I will now show you what I mean.

Most Romanists simplistically assume that John 6:48-58 is referring to the Lord's Supper (Communion) and the transubstantiation which they believe that this Communion ritual involves. But I have already argued that you must not read John 6 literally -- so, the same is obviously true concerning the ideas of the body and blood of Christ in the Communion ritual.

In other words, we must not read mistaken (pagan) notions into John 6:48-58 and then turn around and read the same mistaken notions into, say, Matthew 26:26-29, and then make the whole ungodly mess worse by using our misunderstanding of John 6:48-58 to keep us horribly confused concerning Matthew 26:26-29 and also using Matthew 26:26-29 to keep us horribly confused concerning John 6:48-58!

My point is that Matthew 26:26-29 is not teaching transubstantiation any more than John 6:48-58 is. The Lord's Supper is wonderfully metaphorical. It is not endorsing any sort of Christianized cannibalism as a mechanism for assimilating someone else's virtues!

To stop the vicious cycle of confusion which Romanists do have, I will flatly tell you that John 6:48-58 is not even talking about the Lord's Supper anyway!

Rather, John 6:48-58 is talking about saving faith --and using a wonderful metaphor as a way of doing so. And the Lord's Supper, as instituted in Matthew 26:26-29 is exploiting the same metaphor -- which is found throughout the Bible! -- to give us wonderful material for our faith.

Besides, it is easy to show that John 6:48-58 is talking neither about transubstantiation nor about the Communion ritual in which transubstantiation supposedly occurs (see below).

Look at v.53. If the literal reading of John 6:48-58 is correct, then the sinner who fails to literally partake of this supposedly literal feeding on the literal flesh and blood of Christ is going to wind up in hell. The reason why I say that is because v.53 allows no exceptions whatsoever.

The confused-but-consistent Romanist would understandably conclude that this verse promotes the Communion ceremony to the level of salvation itself -- for the simple reason that, if vv.48-58 are to be read literally, then the transubstantiation which supposedly occurs during the Communion ceremony is the only way in which the sinner could comply with the terms of v.53. But if that understanding is correct, then the Lord Jesus is a liar. The thief who was saved on the cross in the final moments of life never partook of the Communion ceremony -- and yet the Lord told him that he was going straight to Paradise.

It rigorously follows from this that the Romanists have completely misunderstood John 6:48-58.

The fact is, the thief did comply with John 6:53 -- for the simple reason that the verse has nothing/u> whatsoever to do with transubstantiation. Verse 53 is talking about having the soul of Christ supernaturally merged with one's own soul. This is a matter of faith, not digestion. And a hocus-pocus ceremony of ritual cannibalism oddly misses the point as to what a vital union with God in Christ really is!

At the risk of being inordinately tedious (to drive home a point which you Romanists don't want to hear!), let me warn you again that John 6:48-58 is not talking about a ritual of any kind. It is talking about the faith to which the Communion ritual also refers. That being the case, you cannot continue to assert that faith is a matter of doggedly confessing or even believing a doctrine of transubstantiation. The whole mess is superstition masquerading as faith. This is why Protestants have historically condemned Rome's Communion as hocus-pocus ritualism established in lieu of the faith which God demands.

Romanists do not even begin to appreciate the depths of the Protestants' concerns. But you should. This is serious stuff. Satanic deception is a profoundly serious problem, even in professing Christianity. We Protestants think that you need to make absolutely sure you have experienced what the thief on the cross experienced. That's why I am telling you that saving faith is altogether different from the hocus-pocus of the Roman mass.

Now, lest you think I am just a Catholic-basher, I will go on to point out that the saving faith of true Christian conversion is also different from what passes for salvation in a lot of Protestant churches in our day. My point is that a lot of things which pass for saving faith in professing Christianity are no such thing. I'm afraid that most churchgoers miss the narrow-doorway experience of true conversion and wind up in hell. (That's why I often tell folks that as important as church attendance is, it sometimes does prove to be the instrumental means by which people wind up finally damned.)

PLEASE NOTE: I earnestly hope that you can begin to see from this why most historic Protestants utterly reject the RCC and why most of us regard even the ECT movement as a monumental blunder on the part of some naïve Protestant leaders.

Even if you do not agree with our position, you need to notice that we are not as thoughtless as you might be inclined to assume. We look at the Scriptures very carefully indeed. And when we follow the Scriptures carefully, we wind up disagreeing with the RCC on some of the most fundamental points of Christianity.

In short, we historic Protestants don’t think your religious experience is anything like ours. But I submit that our religious experience really does come straight from the Scriptures, whereas yours evidently doesn't. Yours comes to you via the Papacy. Rome just tells you that your spiritual experience is legitimate, saving faith. But we Protestants surmise that you are trusting the Papacy instead of Christ.

In view of what we know about religious deception, we think that is a bad idea, to say the least.

It turns out that the historic Protestants' understanding of saving faith is simpler and purer and more spectacular than you have ever imagined. We fear that you have missed it completely. In fact, we think the professing Church bought into transubstantiation to dress it up for unbelievers and thereby make the partaking of Communion feel more like "faith." Of course, the person who does not have true faith has no idea what it does feel like anyway -- so the whole thing strikes us Protestants as silly. (I certainly didn't know what faith was until I was born again! It turns out to be a pretty staggering thing!)

***

When we are liberated from Rome's wrongheaded interpretation of John 6:48-58, we are liberated to appreciate the amazing passion which pervades the Last Supper.

Perhaps the best way to see that the RCC has completely misunderstood the vital-union theology of John 6 is to look at what the Lord said and did at His Last Supper in Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22. He took some bread and broke it, saying "This is My body…". But it was not literally His body. He was actually holding it with (the fingers of) His body! Therefore, He had to be speaking metaphorically. In each of these three synoptic Gospel texts, He was using the same metaphor as He had used in John 6.

The funny thing is, if you would dare to ignore Rome's interpretations of the Last Supper passages, it would be obvious to you that the Lord was employing metaphor when He said "This is My body."

My point is that the Romanists' refusal to understand the Lord's statement is actually hyper-literal and therefore hyper-spiritual and therefore immediately absurd. The proteins of the bread did not become human proteins at any point (which is also why the bread's taste and appearance are unaltered in the Communion ceremony, of course!). So, it is preposterous to say that the bread literally became the Lord's body. It quite literally did not --since the Lord was not speaking literally anyway! (He was using the same metaphor found throughout in the Bible.)

Besides, if the bread did not become human protein, it was not transubstantiated. Period.

If it did not look and smell like human flesh, it was not human flesh. Human flesh definitely does look like human flesh. There are no exceptions to this. Human flesh smells like human flesh. (As a physician, I will assure you that this is the case!) There are no exceptions to this, either.

I realize that Romanists have been taught that people like me are ungodly scoffers, but the truth is, I am the one who is correct. So, a Protestant such as myself is forced to say that the ungodly scoffers in this case are the Romanists, not the Protestants.

Fair enough? (Remember: Rome insinuated that we Protestants are the unbelievers in this case. This insinuation was utterly false. Your doctrine of transubstantiation actually backfires on you, I'm afraid.)

For that matter, if the morsel which the Lord held when He said "This is My body" did become human protein, which human protein was it? Is it even specifiable? If not, then why not? (The Protestant answer is that the type of human protein can't be specified, because it is not literally human substance at all. It is merely designated in the Lord's Supper as human substance. That's different. And it is very, very important.)

It is not at all unspiritual of me to raise these utterly serious objections to your notion, even if you have been taught that I am just an unbelieving scoffer. The truth is, my objections are correct. Furthermore, you desperately need to realize that an unscriptural notion is all you have -- and that a notion is not the same thing as faith. (This was one of the key warnings of the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers pointed out that knowing the Lord personally is not just some doctrinal notion or two!)

It is spiritually important, of course, to believe what the Lord says, but it is never spiritual to misunderstand Him. So, I earnestly wish that my Romanist friends would wake up to the spiritual realities of what the Lord meant and what He did not mean. Heck, what I am saying is correct -- obviously so. (So, please don't be such a dork as to disagree with me [grin].)

Notice also that in Matthew 26 and Mark 14, the Lord refers to the cup (of wine) as His blood. Well, if that should have been taken literally, then He was lying -- because His blood was still in His body. And since He cannot lie, we have to understand His statement as metaphor -- just as we have to understand John 6:48-58 as metaphor. (Again, this stuff is obvious. The Bible is clear, even if the RCC wants to invoke cannibalistic hocus-pocus to pretend that it's not.)

In short, we cannot read the cup of wine as literally being the Lord's blood. Rather, His metaphor was referring to His literal blood which would be literally poured out. And that's a big difference, one which reveals the doctrine of transubstantiation to be an error of gnostic assensus.

Interestingly, the inspired record in Luke 22 makes this point in a peculiar but important way. The Lord's statement concerning the cup of wine is recorded differently in Luke 22. In v.20, He refers to it as, not His blood, but the New Covenant in His blood. This poses a problematical question for the RCC: "Which is it, Master? Is the wine Your blood, or is it Your New Covenant involving that blood?"

In other words, if the wine literally is His blood, then why does Luke's record steer us away from this toward an obvious metaphor?

The answer is obvious. It's because the whole thing is metaphorical. This shows us again that the Romanists' interpretive presupposition is completely wrong.

It is not more spiritual to read a metaphorical text literally. It is actually less spiritual. (I hope some of my dispensational brethren will think about that as they seek to understand Biblical prophecy, by the way!)

Besides, it ought to be emphasized that the fact that the Lord's Supper ritual is metaphorical does not cheapen it by any means! On the contrary, the metaphorical nature of the Lord's Last Supper is precisely what makes our Lord's Supper observance spiritually powerful. We need to appreciate this. We need to get rid of the hyper-spiritual stuff of the RCC's too-smug literalism. A correct understanding of the metaphor as metaphor helps us to face reality, helps to strip away the pseudo-faith distractions which the RCC's hocus-pocus confusion actually introduces.

And what reality do we need to face? Here it is: at the time of the Last Supper, the God-man Jesus Christ was facing an imminent and horrible betrayal and death. He wanted to institute with His friends, His people, a ceremony of remembrance. As a human being Who was about to be deserted by His friends and tortured to death, He was not giving a magic discourse for gee-whiz nonsense in lieu of poignant true faith!

This is another reason why historic Protestants are offended by the Romanist doctrine of the Eucharist. We take the Lord's Supper more seriously than do the Romanists, not less so. I will have more to say about this when I show you what John 6:48-58 really means. (I haven't bothered to do that yet, because I have been forced to spend almost all of my time showing you what it doesn't mean!)

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***Observation 5: the historic Protestant's strenuous and unfortunately appropriate objections to the Roman Mass

Having already offered a compelling argument that vv.48-58 has to be metaphorical rather than literal, I now want to get further into one of the most important arguments -- an argument which I have only lightly touched upon. I am referring here to the touchy but important subject of cannibalism.

To be sure, I have alluded to cannibalism several times in this series of posts even if I have not bothered (or even dared) to talk much about the idea up until this point. But now I want my Romanist friends to start thinking about it. I believe that if you will ever stop long enough to reflect honestly on what the RCC is pronouncing to be a bizarre but somehow lovely doctrine, you will begin to understand the historic Protestant's strenuous and unfortunately appropriate objections to your mass.

A few months ago, OP actually demonstrated on another thread the propriety of the Protestants' objections when he stated your own doctrine of the Eucharist very clearly for you Romanists. You folks found his demonstration of your position offensive -- and got him temporarily suspended for his efforts on your behalf.

But he was just giving back to you your own doctrine. So, by condemning OP's post, you RCs actually condemned yourselves. You were offended at your own position.

Of course, FR's Romanists claimed that OP had only presented a blasphemous parody of the doctrine of transubstantiation. But this is not the case. What he did was to use the gruesome, realistic language of cannibalism -- and then to ask the important question "Is this what your doctrine of transubstantiation is saying?" Of course, it ultimately is!

This is why I will now say that you really ought to go back and re-read all of my arguments. You need to notice that the Lord was not speaking literally in John 6:48-58. You need to notice that your beloved RCC is dead wrong. You need to notice that your position is a pagan misunderstanding of the Lord's metaphor.

To take the Lord's words literally in an obviously metaphorical context is a disastrous blunder. In the case of John 6:48-58, it really does lead to cannibalism masquerading as Christianity. No kidding.

To underscore this awful fact, I would point out that you Romanists objected to the gruesomeness of OP's display of your doctrine but also that none of you could stand up and tell him that your position is not gruesome. Heck, it is the seeming gruesomeness of Christ's language which convinces you that your literal interpretation is correct! As a matter of fact, I am aware of at least one Romanist on FR who freely admits this. Claud argues for the literal reading of John 6:48-58 on the grounds that the language seems gruesomely voracious to him!

Well, I don’t agree with Claud's conclusion at all. (I'll have more to say about this later.) Nevertheless, the above paragraph does illustrate the Romanists' willingness to believe that Christ is advocating something gruesome and then to turn right around to become incensed at others would dare to press that very point with them.

In my opinion, this is rank hypocrisy. You can't have it both ways. If your position is gruesome, you'd better look at the passage again. You need to realize that the gruesome reading is not correct in the first place. It is pagan. But it definitely is your position.

And please don't play the game of saying it's not really gruesome inasmuch as the Lord has been pleased to make His body and blood look and taste like bread and wine after all. The gruesomeness consists in the pagan idea of literally eating and drinking Christ's blood. You can disguise this idea by appeals to supernatural "mystery" and the like, and you can get angry when someone rips away the disguise by refusing to treat your superstitious doctrine with any reverence , but it is still a gruesomely pagan idea which deserves to be exposed for what it is and thrown out of christendom.

How have you gotten into this mess? It turns out that you have actually stepped into a rhetorical trap. I will elucidate the ominous features of that trap when I present my final argument against the Romanist position. (I might as well tell you that I am saving the best argument for last!)

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***Observation 6: what John chapter 6 does mean

Before I offer my final, crushing argument against the Romanists' interpretation of John 6:48-58, I want to show you what the passage does mean.

First, let's go back and document what we have picked up from the near context and the overall Biblical context:

• We have seen that almost everything the Lord does with the idea of bread is a teaching device concerning spiritual verities. This goes back to the feeding of the five thousand hungry people earlier in John 6, but the bread/food metaphor appears over and over in both Testaments of the Bible.
• We find it in Job. We find it in Deuteronomy. We find it in Ezekiel. We find it in the Wilderness Temptation in the New Testament.
• We even find that the Lord rebuked his disciples for taking Him literally with regard to His bread metaphors.
• We also discover a Biblical-theological parallelism between the carnal/material features of the Fall and the spiritual/non-material features of the Atonement. The important thing to notice is that typology involves a kind of antithetical parallelism. (The literal idea in the type is replaced with a purely spiritual idea in the antitype.)
• We also find the Passover lamb being assimilated through an eating in the Old Testament, but we must not conclude that the Lamb of God is to be literally eaten -- since He is not a literal lamb.

In each of these instances, we find food being used as a metaphor for spiritual Truth. This has nothing whatsoever to do with transubstantiation. It has to do with faith, not the literal consumption of anything whatsoever. (Notice that in Matthew 4:4, Christ was actually fasting when He confronted Satan with the Biblical metaphor of the necessity of feeding upon God's Truth. In other words, Christ definitely was "eating" God's revelatory Truth even though He was not taking any material food whatsoever into His mouth!)

We also see from John 6:31-51 that every single thing in the passage militates against the notion that Christ is speaking of literally eating His flesh. The fact that some of the people in His entourage thought He was speaking of this should remind us that His entourage included people having no spiritual discernment whatsoever (v.36).

Furthermore, when we look at the Romanists' insinuation that John 6:48-58 is talking about the ritual of Communion -- which ritual is ultimately at the center of the transubstantiation controversy -- we discover that it can't be talking about a ritual.

• Verse 52 would be declaring that a person cannot be saved apart from partaking of that ritual, but the thief on the cross was saved. This means that vv.48-58 are not talking about a literal eating of any kind - -not even the symbolic eating which occurs in a ritual observance. Rather, they are talking about vital union with God in Christ through a faith that hungers and thirsts after righteousness.
• And when we look at the Last Supper as the paradigm for the Communion ritual, we discover that it is obvious that Christ was speaking metaphorically rather than literally when He said "This is My body" and "This is My blood." The Lord Jesus even went on to say "This do in remembrance of Me." Transubstantiation is not in view at all. The eating which occurs in the Communion ritual is literal, of course, but it is a memorial teaching device which feeds our souls with Truth--not with the literal substance of the human body of Christ.

The Lord's Supper, then, is just using the same Biblical metaphor which appears over and over and over in the Bible. It is a metaphor for faith, not a declaration of transubstantiation in the Lord's Supper. It is the same metaphor which we find in John 6:48-58, of course. And again, it is a metaphor.

So, it is spiritually irresponsible to take it literally.

On the other hand, it would be spiritually irresponsible not to understand that it is a metaphor for something pretty important! The very fact that the feeding idea occurs over and over and over in the Bible without ever once referring to a literal eating and drinking of Christ's literal flesh and His literal blood should signal us that we'd better notice what the metaphor does mean.

See below.

The flesh-and-blood metaphor in John 6:48-58 is a new metaphor in the larger passage in that flesh and blood are specific ideas which have not been mentioned as such until this point. But the flesh-and-blood metaphor is still just an elaboration on the manna idea, i.e., on the Bread from Heaven metaphor. This is seen when we compare vv.48-51 with v.58.

One reason why we need to see this as merely an elaboration on the earlier metaphor is because we must not stupidly conclude that He is moving away from the idea of Truth from God to a discourse on anatomy. By the same token, He is not abandoning the figurative idea of feeding upon Christ to switch to a literal idea of eating Him in v.51.

But why does the tone change? Why does the language get so vivid?

To answer these questions, we need to notice that in the entire passage which we have been studying (vv.22-58), the Lord Jesus is actually talking about His Own incarnation. He is not merely soul-sustaining Bread for the spiritually hungry soul, but Bread from Heaven. In the entire passage, He is telling sinners that they must appropriate -- i.e., believe! -- this truth of His incarnation. (See especially vv.27-29, which tell us that He is talking about saving faith, not any work of literal eating -- ritual or otherwise.)

The reason why the tone changes in v.51 is because the Lord is talking about the two key ideas in His incarnation (see below).

The human soul is the union of body and spirit. It is specially prepared material substance plus a non-material life force. (This is seen in Genesis 2 when God breathed life into material shaped from the ground and it "became a living soul.") What the Lord is doing in vv.51-58 is splitting the soul idea of the manna from heaven into its constituent elements of material body and non-material spirit. The metaphor for the Person of Christ on whom spiritually hungry souls will feed is now seen to be that of flesh (body) and blood (spirit).

Notice that this vivid presentation of the Person of Christ as constituted of flesh and blood vividly emphasizes the true humanity of Christ. He is a true human being. He literally lived and literally died and literally came back to life to live literally forever. He is a true human soul (Who happens to be materially absent from the earth at this time--which, of course, rules out transubstantiation, in case you haven't noticed!). Having physically departed from the earth, He has left us with His Spirit, but we must remember Him in His humanity in order to access Him in the Spirit of faith where He is now.

In a very important manner of speaking, we must remember Jesus as the Son of Man if we hope for Him to remember us. The bread of Communion is an especially poignant reminder of His human substance. We who desperately hunger after righteousness feed on this truth of His self-sacrificing humanity as we remember Him. He thereby sustains us in Christianity.

The other half of the soul-sustaining truth of Christ's incarnation is the found in the vivid language involving His blood. This idea of blood is not at odds with the humanity idea mentioned earlier, but it is ultimately different. The blood is actually a reference to His life-force. As the Old Testament puts it, "The life is in the blood." When one's blood is poured out, the life is gone from the body. Notice also that when the life-force is gone, the spirit has departed from the body. In this way, the blood functions as an emblem of one's spirit in this presentation of human life.

So, what is the important truth which the true believer will drink as he thirsts after righteousness? It is that the Man Christ Jesus is not merely a man. He is Almighty God. He did not derive His life-force by natural generation from Adam. His Life originates directly in God. He is God Incarnate. His Spirit is the Spirit of God Himself.

This is why Mary's virginity was important. Christ did not derive his life force from Adam even if his flesh was Adamic, i.e.., human. This is why Christ, though human, was born sinless, i.e., not guilty of the crime of Eden. He was never really in Adam, even if He had the same human flesh as the rest of us.

(Beyond this, Mary's virginity is completely unimportant. So is the Romanist theory of Mary's immaculate conception. The RCC's dogmas of Mary's perpetual virginity and Mary's immaculate conception just demonstrate that Romanists do not have a solid appreciation of the Lord's incarnation! Oddly enough, it is much simpler than they are making it by their overweening emphasis on Mary herself.)

At the bottom-line, I am telling you that the sinner must claim Christ as the Mediator between God and men, as the One Who embodied a true merger of true Godhood and true humanity. And I am telling you that we claim Christ only by faith in the Truth of Who He really is. When we have true faith in the Son of Man Who is also the Son of God, we experience the strange merger of God with us.

It is a weird, wonderful experience. We assimilate Christ into our souls. We know Him personally in this very way. And as I have said over and over and over, it has nothing to do with Rome's doctrine of transubstantiation.

As I have repeatedly indicated in these posts, I am concerned that most churchgoers have never experienced this union with God. A disturbingly high percentage of the churchgoers with whom I have discussed the experience of regeneration unto conversion manifestly don't have the foggiest idea what I am talking about it. (And the highly religious Romanists keep trying to make this merger a thing involving the gastrointestinal tract. Oh, great.)

***

Another passage which confuses Romanists is 1 Corinthians 11:29. The very fact that it speaks of the sin of "not discerning the Lord's body" throws them a curve. Most Romanists, being thoroughgoing anti-Protestants, quickly gravitate to the notion that this statement by Paul is affirming their doctrine of transubstantiation and also condemning those who will disagree with them.

But Paul is just respecting the Lord's metaphor as presenting a serious remembrance concerning the awful death of the Son of Man for His elect. Paul understood from the Lord's metaphor that the gospel is not just a notion but a message concerning a very real event involving a very real human being Who died for His people. It is patently obvious that the elements of the Communion ceremony are to be treated with profound respect for what they definitely represent, not for the supposed fact of their transubstantiation (because transubstantiation doesn't take place).

As a matter of fact, if you will read the entire passage, you will discover that is crystal clear that Paul's reference to the sin of "not discerning the Lord's body" has nothing whatsoever to do with transubstantiation but with one's own awareness of membership in the Body of the Church which died in Christ when Christ died. In other words, Paul is mindful of the mystical union between Christ and His people ("His body"!) and arguing from this mystical reality that it is unthinkable for a professing Christian to behave contemptibly toward another true Christian during the Lords Communion ceremony. See vv.19-22 and v.33.

In short, the ceremony is serious. It has momentous spiritual significance. To despise the Body of the Church is to hate the Lord of the ceremony. Inasmuch as this was Paul's point, transubstantiation is not being intimated in the text. When Paul talks about "discerning the body," he is actually talking about making the spiritual connection between the bread of Communion and the human community of the elect.

Another way to say it is that the metaphor of the bread as Christ's human body includes an allusion to that body of humans who vicariously died in Him when He died on the cross! (This is seen in the fact that the Table of Shewbread in the Old Testament tabernacle had twelve loaves on it. This was an obvious symbol of the chosen people themselves! We can be virtually certain that Paul, an expert on the Law, was aware of this symbolism in the tabernacle.)

Furthermore, Paul is telling us that we'd better be sure we are true believers before we partake. This is a big problem with Romanism, which has no real doctrine of conversion. (In this way, Paul's warning amounts to an indirect warning against the doctrine of transubstantiation -- since most of its adherents don't appear to be true believers in Jesus Christ. They certainly don't have the same conversion testimony as the rest of us. Sadly, it is pretty obvious that they don't believe the same Bible which we believe. And by their doctrine of transubstantiation they are heaping contempt on us Protestants as they partake of their "communion." That's not a good idea. The Protestants are the ones who correctly understand and appreciate the ceremony, not the hocus-pocus Romanists.)

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***Observation 7: The Lord deliberately used a metaphor to seal unbelieving sinners in their unbelieving confusion

As I said earlier, I have saved my most ominous argument against transubstantiation for last.

For starters, you need to realize that the overwhelming majority of people in this world have no meaningful spiritual discernment whatsoever. They are stuck in the mire of spiritual foolishness. This foolishness is what Romans 1:18 styles as fallen man's Truth-suppressing wickedness. Almighty God, who is angry with the wicked every day, ordinarily just leaves fools in their foolishness. Their occasionally "impressive" religiosity ordinarily just makes Him more angry -- and more determined [so to speak] to leave them stuck in their foolishness.

You will never fully grasp what the Lord Jesus is doing in this regard in John 6:48-58 unless you really know the Lord Jesus personally. And since by the sheer grace of God I happen to know Him personally, I will assure you that He is not some wimpy nerd who automatically forgives every dorky notion which people have about Him.

What I am saying here is that Jesus Christ is Almighty God. He is the God of the Old Testament. He is the God Who witnessed man's seemingly innocuous crime in Eden and cursed the entire world for that one crime by one man. He is the God of Romans 1. He is the God of Romans 9. He is the God of reprobation. He is the God Who is angry at wicked, Truth-suppressing sinners.

And His very real, fierce anger burns against shallow, hypocritical religionists. (That was the thrust of the famous warning by Jonathan Edwards in 1741, the warning which lit off the Great Awakening which made our great nation great.)

Let me show you from the Scriptures what I mean. In an episode documented in each of the synoptic gospels (Matthew 13, Mark 4, and Luke 8), one of the Lord's inner-circle disciples asked Him why He so often spoke to the religionists of His day in parables. His answer was "So that they will not understand."

This was an ominous statement! The verse which He went on to quote from Isaiah is about reprobation. That verse, Isaiah 6:9, is cited more times in the New Testament than any other verse from the Old Testament. (If my memory serves me correctly, it is used in one form or another nine times in the New Testament.) That stark emphasis should tell us something. Reprobation is a monumentally serious matter. And it is in the hands of God Himself.

To put this in perspective, let me say at this point that metaphorical language in the Bible often does facilitate understanding in the souls of God's elect. To God's elect, it has been given to know, to grasp the things of the Kingdom of Heaven -- and Biblical metaphors are delightful to us in this regard (even when they challenge our understanding). But to the non-elect, this privilege is not given. The Bible's metaphors very often seal the doom of the non-elect. The fact that they may profess to be Christians, the fact that they even think they are Christians, changes nothing. On Judgment Day, they will be revealed as unregenerate fools who publicly fraternized with the Lord, so to speak, who even did good works in His name, but who never really knew the Lord at any time. More to the point, He never knew them.

We see something of this phenomenon in John 6. Gosh, a regenerate sinner should realize that Christ is not talking about literally eating His flesh and literally drinking His blood. But some of His followers didn't get it. And they were actually ordained to not get it.

My point is that Jesus Christ owes the lost sinner nothing except damnation. And the lost sinner's multitude of asinine notions are offensive to Jesus Christ. Therefore, if you are a lost professing Christian, you must not assume that the Lord will gently take you aside and gently straighten you out.

Remember: When asked why He used metaphors in His now enscripturated messages to the people of His Own day, the Lord did not say "Oh, it's because I am a great teacher and I try to present things in a striking and clear way." Rather, He said "It's because I fully intend to let them misunderstand Me." (Remember also that the reprobation verse He went on to quote from Isaiah is the New Testament's favorite Old Testament verse! I have never met a Romanist who knows that or who even has a clear spiritual capacity for reflecting on its significance.)

My point in telling you this is to warn you, as earnestly as I know how, that the Lord Jesus did use metaphors to blind His enemies in their own God-dishonoring foolishness. He did this a lot. By His Own confession, His primary objective in this was not to be understood, but to be misunderstood. And this is precisely what He is doing with the metaphor in John 6:48-58.

No kidding. The RCC has stepped into a God-ordained trap. (If you say "But Jesus would never let that happen--much less ordain it!," I will urge you to read 2 Thessalonians 2:8-12. And I will gladly point out some other things which you have never been willing to face about the RCC. But I will not bring them up in this series of posts.)

I am sure that the Romanists reading this post will be horrified and angry at what I am saying, but I am afraid that my explanation of the passage is correct. The Lord Jesus planned His discourse to let spiritually silly pagans -- certainly including lost professing Christians ("Christian Pharisees"?) -- think that He was talking about literally eating and drinking His literal flesh and blood.

The whole thing is rather funny -- if one happens to be a Protestant. The Lord surely knew about the controversy which had arisen as of v.52 concerning his metaphorical discussion of the Old Testament type of Christ, the Bread of Heaven. What did He do about it? Did He stop and say "Hey, guys, I am just expounding the very-common Old Testament metaphor. The literal feeding is a symbolic reference to the non-literal feeding which is saving faith. Only a spiritual bonehead would conclude from My discourse that you are supposed to eat Me physically. Puh-leez be more discerning. Puh-leez pay more attention to the situational context and the overall Biblical context."

Nope, He didn't do this. He just plowed forward knowing many of His hearers were hyper-literal nitwits. The fact is, He was more than willing for them to misunderstand. (Remember: He was angry at them for their carnally stupid, disrespectful unbelief. They were tempting Almighty God by their behavior!)

What He did do in vv.52-58 was to extend the metaphor in a way which could be expected to worsen their dilemma of foolish confusion. He used the seemingly awful language of voraciously devouring His human flesh and the nauseating imagery of drinking His blood.

Romanists, of course, have concluded from the apparent gruesomeness of the language that He must have been speaking literally. The rest of us, however, have rightly concluded that this is a very good reason to believe that He was not speaking literally (as the larger passage and the overall Biblical context also confirm, of course). The Lord was talking about the desperation of elect sinners in their hungering and thirsting after righteousness, but He knew that his vivid language would discover ungodly thoughts in the foul minds of the non-elect.

The Lord was sometimes even willing to risk confusion on the part of His Own inner circle of disciples, because He knew that He could correct them in private on an as-needed basis. The important question for you is this: What is the Lord doing with you through me? Are you elect in the heart of God, or will my thoroughly Scriptural warnings just make you angry at me? In other words, is it too late for you?

***

Let me now be crystal clear about something: I am not merely supposing that the Lord was using a metaphor as a trap for foolish sinners in John 6. It is a fact that He was doing so.

As I have already pointed out, He did this sort of thing all the time -- by His Own admission of this fact. And it is a fact that all of the evidence in John 6 and in the Bible as a whole disproves your doctrine of transubstantiation. And it is a fact that the doctrine of transubstantiation amounts to a hocus-pocus form of cannibalism.

Perhaps you are still reluctant to believe what I am showing you about the deception which has ensnared you in a bizarre religiosity. If that is the case, let me show you some other facts from the text.

Go back to v.37. It is a verse about God's predestination in matters of salvation. In the second half of that verse, the Lord presents the free offer of the gospel: "The one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out." But the overall idea in verse is not appreciated until we grasp the first half of the verse: "All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me."

That is talking about predestination. This is a fact which is beyond any controversy.

Biblical predestinarians embrace both halves of v.37. But we notice that v.37 implicitly warns that the Father has not elected everyone unto saving faith -- and this despite the truth of the free offer of the gospel!

It is also a fact that the Lord Jesus issued this ominous statement concerning God's sovereignty in salvation immediately after He pronounced a bunch of His nominal followers unbelievers. Remember: They had remained faithless in spite of the privilege of a live interview with the Lord; in spite of the Lord's instruction concerning the serious matter of believing His testimony; and in spite of the miracles which He had already performed for them. The Lord was explaining the mess of their unbelief. He was alluding to the fact that only God's elect will receive saving faith.

In other words, the wonderfully awful idea of God's sovereignty in bestowing saving faith was integral to Christ's doctrinal thinking at this point. This becomes crystal clear when we see what He said in v.44: "No one can come to me, unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day." This promise of resurrection bliss, prefaced as it is by a doctrinally profound warning, has the same rhetorical form as v.37. And in the first half of v.44, the Lord Jesus was clearly talking about the predestinarian doctrine of the sinner's utter depravity (and associated helplessness) in unbelief.

It should also be noted that the Lord made the pronouncement of v.44 right after further displays of unbelief on the part of His nominal followers. He really was explaining the fact that they were spiritual boneheads.

So, it is a fact that the Lord Jesus was peculiarly aware that the unbelieving sinners whom He was addressing were at God's mercy for the spiritual discernment associated with saving faith. And it is a fact that He was aware that there was no meaningful evidence that God the Father was drawing any of them to God in Christ.

It is also a fact that the Lord was deferring to His Father in the matter of who would wind up with saving faith. (This is one of important ideas in both v.37 and in v.44.) But it is also a fact that the Lord Jesus is the Almighty God Himself. And Christ's determination to defer to the First Person of the Trinity for the grace which follows election does not leave Christ with nothing whatsoever for Him to do with sinners.

That fact becomes important when we realize that the sinners in our passage had made Him angry. The fact is, their unbelief was offensive to Him. Not only had they tempted God by stupidly and disrespectfully seeking signs, but they also grumbled in their unbelief in v.43. (Remember: The Lord Jesus is the God Who slew 40,000 Israelites for the sin of murmuring in the Old Testament!)

In His anger, Christ decided to make an example of the unbelievers in His entourage. And that is why He exercised His divine prerogatives to permit His unregenerate hearers to get even more confused in vv.48-58. He owed them nothing except damnation anyway. The Spirit of God could still illuminate their minds as to what He was really saying, but the Lord Jesus was not Personally interested in being humanly clear. He was more interested in teaching His truly faithful disciples the doctrine of God's sovereignty (and hence, His Own sovereignty!) in salvation.

The Lord's faithful would witness the entire controversy; would notice the confusion; would notice that the Lord wasn't exactly brokenhearted (!) over the confusion; and would notice from this that He was not necessarily trying to build up a big following anyway. Those are facts. This is easy to see when we read vv.60-65 as a unit. In v.60, it is impossible to tell precisely what the unbelievers were concluding about the Lord's extended metaphor. However, it is virtually certain that some of them did still think that He was speaking literally in vv.48-58. (Remember: They had thought so as early as v.52 -- when it was clearly stupid to believe that He was speaking literally -- and the Lord did nothing whatsoever to help them out of their confusion. What He did say in the vivid language of His extended metaphor in vv.52-56 just made their dilemma of unbelief worse. Oddly enough, their misunderstanding was their own fault through the entire discourse!)

Think about that for a minute. As I said at the outset of this series of posts, the Roman insinuation that the Protestant position is one of unbelieving apostasy actually backfires on you. I have demonstrated by numerous irrefutable arguments that the Lord was not speaking literally in vv.48-58. I would therefore dare to argue that many of the people who left Christ complaining that His teaching was too hard, too awful, were those who did think that He was speaking literally -- when He wasn't. And again, I am flatly declaring that this was not an accident. The Lord deliberately used a metaphor to seal unbelieving sinners in their unbelieving confusion. He really was driving home the point He had made in v.44. He was making the depraved unbelief of His strictly nominal followers almost comically conspicuous.

In other words, He did not care to save them -- at least not most of them! On the contrary, He made fools out of them as a group for their repeated displays of spiritual impertinence.

The take-home point here is that the God Who is Jesus Christ Himself is absolutely sovereign in salvation. The Lord was showing His elect that non-elect sinners cannot believe the gospel (and that even an elect sinner will not be saved until God's timing has arrived for a truly sound conversion to Christ). He was showing His faithful disciples that in the decidedly awful providence of our sovereign God, non-elect sinners will never be supernaturally humbled to savingly understand what saving faith is.

And this is true of churchgoers, too. Being religious is not the same thing as having saving faith.

Now, having conceded that we cannot know precisely what the unbelievers were thinking in v.60, I will go on to concede that some of the unbelievers in the group may have begun to suspect that He was speaking in metaphorical terms. But even that insight would not be enough to save them. The problem is, they still could not appreciate what the Lord Jesus was saying about saving faith. And they definitely were aggravated in their confusion. There aggravation was made worse by the realization that He was talking about something profound which was definitely beyond their experiential grasp. His whole discourse just irritated them pretty badly.

At any rate, the unbelievers complained in v.60. The Lord was aware of this, as He had been aware of their earlier grumblings, and He responded by shifting His emphasis away from the doctrine of His incarnation as the Spiritual God perfectly united with man. He went back to the matter they had specifically grumbled about in vv.41-42. He confronted them in v.62 with the fact of His pre-existence in Heaven.

In other words, He warned these smug and unbelieving religionists that He is the LORD.

Now, please notice that this dovetails beautifully with the doctrine of God's sovereignty in salvation. In the overall context, it constitutes a fearful warning indeed for the fools who would dare to say that the faith which mysteriously merges a sinner's soul with the soul of Christ surely has to be something which any sinner can produce. Gosh, everything in the passage, including the confusion which the sinners in our passage displayed, demonstrates that saving faith -- the truly repentant kind! -- is both fully supernatural and sovereignly bestowed or withheld by the Lord God of Heaven. The passage is ultimately telling us that although the elect sinner will be saved (v.37), the non-elect sinner is doomed (v.44). Moreover, the non-elect sinner is doomed in his own spiritual stupidity. And by a very simple application of the text to our own Church Age, the non-elect professing Christian is doomed in his peculiarly religious stupidity.

Are there such folks in professing Christianity? You bet there are. There are tares all over the place. (According to Matthew 13:30, God already plans to burn them.) And it would appear that some denominations are dominated by tares rather than by true Christians.

So, if you think that the point of John 6 is to teach us a doctrine of transubstantiation, you have completely missed the point. The real point of John 6 is that although saving faith is a thing which must be responsibly and arduously exercised by a given sinner, it is ultimately a supernatural work attributable to God, not to man (see again v.29!). It follows from this theological reality that non-elect sinners cannot be saved. Churchgoing reprobates will never experience saving faith. The God of predestination will just leave them in their confusion. They deserve nothing from Him but damnation anyway.

As a way of showing that this really is what the Chapter is emphasizing, let me remind you that v.37 keys on both the omnipotence and sovereignty of God in His work of saving sinners by uniting them to Christ in true faith, not the dopey/carnal religiosity which the lost Jews displayed in John 6. Let me also remind you that v.44 went on to delineate the mess the confused Jews were in (i.e., they were manifestly not elect in the heart of God). Finally, let me point out that the ominous warning of v.44 is actually repeated in v.65.

FINALLY, let me point out that the controversial passage (vv.48-58) which the Romanists have incorrectly interpreted as presenting a doctrine of transubstantiation, as the supposedly pivotal teaching of the Chapter, is actually bracketed by v.44 and its echoing verse, v.65. These two ominous verses warn us that the Lord is not even trying to save everyone.

And that makes the bracketed passage all the more ominous. Christ definitely did use metaphors to suffer His enemies to perish in their confusion.

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

It may take a shock like that to get thru to them, but you probably won't, so all you are effectively doing is throwing what is Holy to the dogs.

Matthew 7:6.... Perhaps. (sigh) Perhaps.

But me, as regards the RCC -- I am still hoping there's still some elect Samaritans to be reached, in this particular kennel (Matthew 15:26-27).

[drstevej]

My comment was reference to Cardinal Law's refusal to remove from ministry priests he knew to have violated boys, hence bearing some clear responsibility. No comment was intended about any one else.

[Matchett-PI]

"You really are a seducer, aren't you?"

Only of those mentioned in 2 Tim. 3:6. LOL

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

My comment was reference to Cardinal Law's refusal to remove from ministry priests he knew to have violated boys, hence bearing some clear responsibility. No comment was intended about any one else.

Exactly. And that was obvious. To all.

Which is why I don't cotton to Xzins attempt to appeal to your reference to Cardinal Law in his attempt to find himself a fig leaf with which to cover his Ninth-Commandment-breaking slander of deliberately implying that I personally am a pederast, as he "lightheartedly kidded".

Anyway, 'nuff of that.

[drstevej]

When it comes to Geneva in the 16th century you haven't got a clue. Buying a vowel would not help.

You merely suppress the truth so you can continue tossing these revisionistic "cream pies" at Calvinism/Calvinists.

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

Nothing will take me from the Church that Jesus Christ founded.

Cribbing a Matatics one-liner for my own purposes, ahem....

"Revenge of the Begged Question".

[St.Chuck]

I am not seeking any position of honor in heaven.

You come across as though you have already attained it. What about my post 193 where I "smash, crush, and destroy your interpretation of 2 Tim 3:16-17.

[BlackVeil]

Very thoughtful post, quite different from many of the others on this thread! I agree that the link, with the Eucharist, is faith, and I think that the notion of the spirit transforming matter is key.

At risk of igniting a firestorm, I would observe that the notion of consuming the body of the incarnate God relates, historically, to the Greek mystery religions. Most especially in the cult of Dionysius, the god of shepherds and the god of wine, known as "the good shepherd" and as "the true vine". Some people would say that this invalidates the scriptures, but another interpretation is that God allowed foreshadowings of Christianity in the pagan religions, and so the myth preceeded the reality. Apparently, one notion stressed by the Dionysian initiates is that the death of the body is a necessary part of the re-birth of the soul. Also, that the divine son suffered, and overcame suffering. These profound ideas may have paved the way for the New Testament.

Anyway, I think that Jesus would be very sorry to think that the holy insitution of the Eucharist has led to such hatred! It was not His will, it is the doing of men.

[Matchett-PI]

"Thank you for those quotes from John - especially this one: And the Word said, "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you."

You're welcome, but I deliberately included that Scripture from John 6 to see if you would pluck it out from the others and "especially" like that "one". LOL

Remember, you said: "I accept the words of Jesus exactly as they are written in John 6." So how about telling me why you didn't "especially like" the other Scripture I quoted in John 6:

"The words I speak to you [they] are spirit and [they] are life; the flesh profits nothing." [John 6:63]

Then, of course, I would like your comments about these Scriptures, too:

[John 1:1,14]: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"

"And the WORD became FLESH and dwelt among us .."

And the Word said: "The flesh profits nothing" But "the words I speak to you [they] are spirit and [they] are life." [John 6:53,63]

[BlackVeil]

I know I can not hold my own with you in a debate. But I can have the deep and abiding faith in my Lord ... Good on you! Peace and blessings, dear Brother. Thanks for putting a post about Christianity ... there were so few of them (grin!)

[Revelation 911]

wonder who isn't? Has this troubled you for some time? :>)

...at what point do I get accused of killing the thread ?

[Matchett-PI]

"You don't think personalities and Christian values have anything to do with one another?"

Both personality and temperament are God-given individual qualities.

"Christian values" are a different subject all together.

It is a given that some personalities and temperaments will clash. The shy, timid and retiring types don't *relate* to the gregarious, assertive / aggressive types, etc.

Only when emotional immaturity is added into the mix will there be problems with "opposites" getting along.

So if the thin-skinned emotion-driven can't control their emotional knee-jerk reactions to things they read here, and can't stop trying to regulate behavior they disapprove of, it would behoove them to drop off the thread and leave the debate to the more calm, reasoned, objective mentalities.

One size does not fit all. If you can't face that fact, why hang around and get mad every time your leveling tactics are resisted. Join the nicey-nice ladies' forum or some other forum where you won't get your feelings hurt.

[the_doc]

You come across as though you have already attained it.

Well, at least I don't permit you to call me HOLY FATHER (ha!).

You resent my dogmatic, uncompromising way of argumentation. The funny thing is, I actually FOLLOW the Scriptures' warnings about not usurping the place of Almighty God in the Temple of God and about receiving adoration which belongs only to Jesus Christ. On the other hand, you don't see anything wrong with the Pope making dogmatic and uncomplromising pronouncements--despite the fact that your Pope is clearly in EXPLICIT AND FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.

Oh, I know you say that the Pope "interprets" the Scriptures. Well, pardon me for stating the obvious, but that's like saying the Supreme Court Justices in New Jersey and Florida are "interpreting the law"!

So, come on, St. Chuck, wake up. The institution of the Papacy is one gigantic violation of the Bible. The only reason why you can't see this is because your Papacy is protected by demonic power--which power also operates in your soul by virtue of your carnal prejudices.

(I'm sure you'll love that one.)

What about my post 193 where I "smash, crush, and destroy your interpretation of 2 Tim 3:16-17.

Well, I read your post and typed a response. But my browser locked up and I lost the draft. So, we will just have to put off your embarrassment (grin).

No kidding, you need to re-think what is going on. Demonic deception is immeasurably more profound than you have realized. Reprobation is a very real and pervasive problem for the children of Adam.

God is not like you think He is. Jesus Christ is not like you think He is.

[Matchett-PI]

Thanks for doubling the evasion. That's all the rope I'll need to give you. LOL

[the_doc]

"Revenge of the Begged Question"

Very appropriate quip.

Aside to sandyeggo: Do you see why OP said that? It's ultimately because you are presuming that the RCC is the Church the Jesus built, even as we are earnestly warning you that it's NOT.

You are responding that you will not hear our warnings to the effect that the RCC is NOT the Church Jesus built--on the grounds that you will not forsake your confidence in the Church that Jesus built.

Oh, great. (Step back from this whole thing and look at the picture again. Don't you see anything fishy here?)

[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

Oh, I know you say that the Pope "interprets" the Scriptures.

Yeah, but if you can't read the Text, how can you read the Gloss?

I'm just wondering... if regenerate Christians are not "qualified" to read the Bible with understanding, what makes the proclamations of the RCC so much more easily intelligible and understandable?

Is it, perhaps, because RCC theological language is so invariably clear, unambiguous, and explicit on all subjects??

If it is asserted that the Bible is more-or-less hopelessly unintelligible to the eyes of prayerful, regenerate Christians, how is it that RCC proclamations are so easily intelligible to those very same eyes??

(with apologies to BibChr for plagiarizing his arguments... assuming that I was able to understand what I read of his arguments, that is!!)

best, op

[Matchett-PI]

"Thanks for putting a post about Christianity ... there were so few of them (grin!)"

We're highly honored to have the likes of you two spiritual giants condescending to hang out with us low-life wino, glutton, evil scum-of-the-earth, unchristian-types for a while. (grin)

[drstevej]

I was going to reply to your post, but I am not confident that I can read you rightly. I have a freep mail into JPII asking him to tell me what you just posted.

Their argument is like the person who shouts "There is no truth" and expects you to agree that this is true!