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Obedience isn't really the issue. With the exception of a few very minor sects, all Christians everywhere observe the Lord's Supper on a regular basis. But obedience to commands He has given us are not the efficient cause of our salvation. As James says, true believers don't just talk about their faith, they live it. But as Paul says, that obedience is a byproduct of God working in us "both to will and to do His good pleasure." The efficient cause of our salvation is the faith God gives us to believe on Jesus as our crucified and risen Lord and Savior.

But obedience to man is not obedience to God. No Christian desiring to be faithful to Christ should engage in any practice based on one group's false interpretation of Scripture, no matter what claims of authority that group makes, especially if that obedience puts one at odds with other, obvious, basic commands of God, such as not worshiping made-made objects, even if some shaman tells them it's OK because the incantation turned the object into God.

The fact remains, none of the passages in the NT dealing with the Lord's Supper justify the sacramental approach to the bread and wine. The Lord's Supper is specifically set forth, not as a means of periodic refueling on grace, but as a way to remember what Jesus did for us in giving Himself to be both broken and spilled out to win our salvation, once and for all. And all we who believe are the living body of Christ, and that is the offense Paul warns against in Corinth, that in what should be a celebration of Christian love for our Savior and each other, some were abusing it as a way to foster division in the body of Christ. It is that cruelty of believer to believer that Paul warned would make one unworthy to partake, because we all should be one in Him, and no one should partake who is hard-hearted toward his brother. That is the failure to discern of which Paul spoke, not some theoretical substance swapping magic "discovered" nine centuries later by Radbertus.

And John 6 isn't even about the Lord's Supper. It's about feeding on Jesus by believing in Him. The eating is spiritual, not fleshly. The unbelievers in the crowd couldn't grasp the meaning of the bread metaphor, so they got stuck on a hyper-literal absurdity. Jesus even told them this was about spiritual things, not physical. They weren't going to have to break the law to obey the Author of the law. But they stubbornly stayed stuck on physical. It freaked them out and they abandoned Him, not because He was asking them to break the law and consume Him physically, but because down deep they were not being drawn to Him by the Father, and therefore they could not feed on Him spiritually, which is only to say, they could not believe on Him unto eternal life.

Did a handful of the early Christian writers use "realistic" language to describe the elements? Yes, that started happening. Not right away (it is missing from the Didache, for example), but it began with a trickle and became more prominent as the centuries passed. But even among those early mentions, many still qualify as the innocent use of direct metaphor and no more. Others are casting the elements as platonic types to the archetype of the physical reality of Jesus, the purpose being polemic refutation of Docetism and other errors, and have nothing whatsoever to do with Radbertus' alchemy of substances.

But the fallible writings of fallible men are not on a par with the God-breathed Scriptures. Such writings are instructive, and often beneficial, but not controlling, especially when they conflict with God's own words. And in Scripture you will never find Christian theurgy, the use of sacramental ritual to connect with and draw resources from deity, thus you will never find Christians being urged to worship any supposedly transformed made-made object, though this was common among the pagan philosophies. It took centuries of interaction with platonic and neoplatonic ideas to ween the Roman schism away from the simplicity of Scriptural worship and get fully caught up in superstition regarding the Lord's Supper. It is the duty of all who would remain obedient to Christ to resist that corruption, and look to the words of God for the truth, which in the case of the Lord's Supper, is to remember Him by it, and to proclaim His death till He comes back for us.

Peace,

SR