Replies

Glad to hear from you again. One never knows how these abandoned threads will work for a continuing conversation.

1. On Prophets.

As for Jonah, of course he has an exception, but that exception is spelled out in Jeremiah 18, in which God say the following:

Jer 18:7 At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; [8] If that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.

So what happened with Nineveh is consistent with the test of Moses. Basically, any national prophecy based on the wickedness of those people, can be averted by repentance. I have no problem with that.

But I do have a problem with would-be prophets who proclaim they know the day of Christ’s return, and when they miss, they blame it on someone else. Or a “prophet” who misses things then says they’re getting “better at it.” What the heck is that? Edgar Cayce could say as much, and I don’t follow him either. But worst of all is the prophet whose sayings come true, yet if they are believed, they will lead people away from God, away from Christ and His Gospel. Moses accounted for such prophets. They are tests from God. Who will we believe? Some mere mortal wonder worker? Or the plain and simple of God’s own word?

Consider what Jesus said:

Mark 13:22 For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect.

The false prophets of the last days are going to be endowed with a great power to deceive, up to and including “signs and wonders.” So powerful in fact that even “the elect” could be deceived, if that were possible. This should make us very cautious. This is not the time to start trusting spiritual “strangers” offering us “candy.” Rather, his warning, in view of the times in which we live, should make us cling even tighter to the simplicity of truth we were given in Scriptures. That will guide us home.

2. On the Eucharist.

You ask a very revealing question: Why would I not want the Eucharist to be true? It is revealing because it shows the loop we’re in, and why I believe God will reprimand all of us to some degree for these arguments. Allow me to explain.

To you, the Eucharist represents being as close to Christ as it is possible to get. If I am wrong, please feel free to correct me. Now, wanting to be close to Christ is a good and wonderful thing, and it is one of the reasons our conversation continues. I like you, I like your passion for God as you understand him. I really think your heart is in the right place.

However, for you it appears impossible to consider that Scripture does not point us to quasi-physical objects consecrated by a ministerial priest as the means of achieving that closeness to Christ. So you want to “shake” me. Would shaking me convince me? God gave me a Bible, and a mind, and he also redeemed me from a life of wickedness with a death sentence built into it. Needless to say, I adore him every day of my life, in spirit and in truth, and I take what He says extremely seriously, and only that will convince me of the right way to know and be close to him.

So here we two sit, both wishing to honor God. That’s good. But no one of any persuasion has yet made the case to me why I should give up on the supremacy of God’s word to govern my life and nourish my union with Christ. Jesus puts it well, and this is where I live in him:

John 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.

3. On Real Presence

You note that the belief in the “real presence” is widespread in Christian faith, although you frame it as “Eucharist,” which of course carries your own package of nuances, specifically transubstantiation. But the notion of “real presence” in protestant circles is nothing remotely like transubstantiation, so it is misleading to make such a statement.

And I have experience with various denominations, some which hold to pure Zwinglian memorialism, some which hold to what they would call “spiritual presence,” and even the Lutheran consubstantiation. The problem with all of these is they do not aid your case. Not one of these is transubstantiation in the form given by Trent, as given here:

“If anyone says that in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and denies that wonderful and singular change of the whole substance of the bread into the body and the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the appearances only of bread and wine remaining, which change the Catholic Church most aptly calls transubstantiation, let him be anathema.” (Council of Trent, Second Canon, Thirteenth Session).

So that right there is your burden to defend, because whoever does not believe it is anathematized by Rome. As I pointed out in my previous post, a number of important Fathers made statements that contradict the Trent formulation, and nothing in Scripture supports it, though the scriptural argument for “spiritual presence” as practiced by the Reformed churches is at least plausible. But they are all anathema, in theory, because they do not see the corporeal presence of Christ in the elements per Trent’s “substance versus appearance” model.

In fact, you and your companions love to point out how Rome is needed to keep a unified body of truth in the Church. But how many average Catholics really understand the Eucharist of Trent? It is extraordinarily complex. To really get it, you have to not only be adept at pagan Greek philosophy, namely Aristotle’s science of categories, but you also have to be able to invert said categories. I’m talking about substance versus accident, two important Greek concepts clearly identified above in the Trent formulation as required belief to avoid anathematization.

This is a difficult ride, but if you’re interested, I’ll try to explain it to you the best I understand it. Otherwise you can skip to the end. And please take no offence. This is just my honest attempt to analyze the problem:

In classical form, the Greeks present a puzzle: If I put my foot into a river twice, is it the same river each time? In one sense yes, because you look and there the river is, you touch the water and you feel the river. In another sense no, because the water moves, and is never the same water twice. To be able to discuss the river as a river, you cannot discuss it in terms of its “accidents,” the moving water that is never in the same place twice. So you need a concept called “substance” to identify with stability what the river is conceptually.

How does this relate to transubstantiation? The ministerial priesthood of Rome asserted themselves as necessary intermediaries between men and God. One of the means of sustaining this claim was the assertion of power to consecrate the elements of the Eucharist, to effectively perform a public miracle on demand that enabled union with God.

The problem was, you couldn’t see the effects of this miracle. At all. Except for an occasional story of an Eucharistic miracle. But how to explain the vast majority of consecrations that yielded no visible change in the elements, that was the problem.

Enter transubstantiation. Proposed in an early form in the 9th Century by one Benedictine monk, it eventually became more popular and was formally recognized by the 4th Lateran Council in 1215AD. But it didn’t reach its Aristotelian zenith until Aquinas undertook to reconcile all of Christian theology with all of Aristotle.

Under Aquinas, the Eucharist is said to work something like this. The bread has substance, the categorical quality of being bread. It also has the accidents that give it the appearance of being bread, whiteness, flakiness, etc. Upon being consecrated, the bread ceases to have the substance of bread, but now has the substance of Christ in his entirety, including not only his divinity but his physical body.

But what happened to the accidents? They do not reflect the change in substance. They are, as it were, freestanding. A thing can look, act, and taste like bread, based on nothing real, but entirely on what appears to the senses, which of course is not the real thing, because the real thing is the substance.

Still with me? Remember, you can be anathematized for not believing this. It’s all spelled out in Aquinas.

But it gets scarier. Because if you were watching closely, you noticed that the sense of substance versus accident is inverted from its Aristotelian prototype. In the river analogy, the accidents (moving water, etc.) are the changeable part, while the substance (river-ness) remains the same. Whereas in transubstantiation, the substance is the changeable part (being Christ versus being bread) , while the accidents (perceptible attributes of bread) remain the same.

Example: Say you have a dog. Under Aristotle (uninverted), the substance is dogness, the accidents are furriness, panting, cold nose, four-legged-ness, etc. Under Aritstotle (inverted), the dogness (substance) goes away, but all the visible attributes of dogness (accidents) remain, furriness, panting, etc. In other words, in general terms, any given object might be any other given object, based on a claimed miracle, for which there is no method or means of verification, and no basis in Scripture.

And remember, if you disagree with any of those features of transubstantiation, Trent deems you to be anathema. So what does the average congregant do? Ignore all the fancy stuff and worship Christ as best they can understand him. And by golly if that means the priest said he made a miracle then he made a miracle, even if I can’t see any such miracle. And now we trot out the passage about faith being the evidence of things not seen, and we can really bamboozle that poor parishioner into thinking he’s got invisible cloths, even though he’s really buck naked.

That is why there had to be a Reformation. Reformation is Biblical. It’s just another word for correction. It doesn’t assume everything is bad, only that some things need to be corrected. But what happened in Israel when God sent His (true) prophets with a corrective word to his people. They killed those prophets, and rejected their correction. They are an example to us. We should be careful not to miss a reformation of God’s own making. It is for our good that he sometimes chastises us, as a loving Father would.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

Peace,