Again protest spin. I do believe that someone has sold you an incorrect understanding of the Word of God. I think that protestants do not realize that their protests of the Catholic Church does not change the Word of God entrusted to the Catholic Church until the end of time. I do hope that you gain a true understanding and gain salvation with God.
St Augustine believed in the Real Presence:
Actually, the Fathers of the Church were clearly unanimous when it comes to the Real Presence. As far as Tertullian is concerned, there is some question as to whether or not he should be categorized as a true Church Father because of the fact that he died a Montanist heretic. But that doesn’t really matter for our purpose here, because he clearly did believe in the Real Presence anyway.
When Tertullian and St. Augustine use the term “figurative,” they do not mean to deny the Real Presence. In the texts cited, St. Augustine, for example, is warning against falling into the trap of believing the Lord was going to cut off parts of his body and give them to us. This would be cannibalistic and that is a definite no-no.
Indeed, both Tertullian and St. Augustine are emphasizing the fact that the Lord’s body and blood are communicated under the “appearances,” “signs,” or “symbols” of bread and wine. “Figure” is another synonym for “sign.” Even today the Catechism of the Catholic Church uses the terms “sign” and “symbol” to describe the Eucharist in paragraphs 1148 and 1412.
In the case of Tertullian, all we have to do is go on reading in the very document quoted above to get a sense of how he is using the term “figure,” and it is entirely Catholic. Notice what he goes on to say:
Then, having taken the bread and given it to His disciples, He made it His own body, by saying, This is my body, that is, the figure of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been, unless there were first a veritable body. An empty thing, or phantom, is incapable of a figure. If, however, (as Marcion might say,) He pretended the bread was His body, because He lacked the truth of bodily substance, it follows that He must have given bread for us. It would contribute very well to the support of Marcion’s theory of a phantom body...
Tertullian’s point here is that Marcion’s “theory of a phantom body” fits with Christ “pretend[ing] the bread was His body,” because Marcion denied Jesus had a body in the first place. But the Christian believes Christ “made it His own body, by saying, This is my body.” The transformation does not take away the symbolic value of bread and wine, it confirms it.
Tertullian makes clear in multiple places that he believed that Jesus communicated his true body and blood under the “figures” or appearances of bread and wine:
From Catholic answers:http://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/eucharist
I. THE REAL PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST
In this section we shall consider, first, the fact of the Real Presence, which is, indeed, the central dogma; then the several allied dogmas grouped about it, namely, the Totality of Presence, Transubstantiation, Permanence of Presence and the Adorableness of the Eucharist; and, finally, the speculations of reason, so far as speculative investigation regarding the august mystery under its various aspects is permissible, and so far as it is desirable to illumine it by the light of philosophy.
(1) The Real Presence as a Fact
According to the teaching of theology a revealed fact can be proved solely by recurrence to the sources of faith, viz. Scripture and Tradition, with which is also bound up the infallible magisterium of the Church.
(a) Proof from Scripture
This may be adduced both from the words of promise (John, vi, 26 sqq.) and, especially, from the words of Institution as recorded in the Synoptics and St. Paul (I Cor., xi, 23 sqq.). By the miracles of the loaves and fishes and the walking upon the waters, on the previous day, Christ not only prepared His hearers for the sublime discourse containing the promise of the Eucharist, but also proved to them that He possessed, as Almighty God-man, a power superior to and independent of the laws of nature, and could, therefore, provide such a supernatural food, none other, in fact, than His own Flesh and Blood.
This discourse was delivered at Capharnaum (John, vi, 26-72), and is divided into two distinct parts, about the relation of which Catholic exegetes vary in opinion. Nothing hinders our interpreting the first part [John, vi, 26-48 (51)] metaphorically and understanding by “bread of heaven” Christ Himself as the object of faith, to be received in a figurative sense as a spiritual food by the mouth of faith. Such a figurative explanation of the second part of the discourse (John, vi, 52-72), however, is not only unusual but absolutely impossible, as even Protestant exegetes (Delitzsch, Köstlin, Keil, Kahnis, and others) readily concede.
First of all the whole structure of the discourse of promise demands a literal interpretation of the words: “eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood”.
For Christ mentions a three-fold food in His address, the manna of the past (John, vi, 31, 32, 49, 59), the heavenly bread of the present (John, vi, 32 sq.), and the Bread of Life of the future (John, vi, 27, 52).
Corresponding to the three kinds of food and the three periods, there are as many dispensers—Moses dispensing the manna, the Father nourishing man’s faith in the Son of God made flesh, finally Christ giving His own Flesh and Blood.
Although the manna, a type of the Eucharist, was indeed eaten with the mouth, it could not, being a transitory food, ward off death.
The second food, that offered by the Heavenly Father, is the bread of heaven, which He dispenses hic et nunc to the Jews for their spiritual nourishment, inasmuch as by reason of the Incarnation He holds up His Son to them as the object of their faith.
If, however, the third kind of food, which Christ Himself promises to give only at a future time, is a new refection, differing from the last-named food of faith, it can be none other than His true Flesh and Blood, to be really eaten and drunk in Holy Communion.
This is why Christ was so ready to use the realistic expression “to chew” (John, vi, 54, 56, 58: trogein) when speaking of this, His Bread of Life, in addition to the phrase, “to eat” (John, vi, 51, 53: phagein).
Cardinal Bellarmine (De Euchar., I, 3), moreover, calls attention to the fact, and rightly so, that if in Christ’s mind the manna was a figure of the Eucharist, the latter must have been something more than merely blessed bread, as otherwise the prototype would not substantially excel the type. The same holds true of the other figures of the Eucharist, as the bread and wine offered by Melchisedech, the loaves of proposition (panes propositionis), the paschal lamb.
The impossibility of a figurative interpretation is brought home more forcibly by an analysis of the following text:
“Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed” (John, vi, 54-56).
It is true that even among the Semites, and in Scripture itself, the phrase, “to eat some one’s flesh”, has a figurative meaning, namely, “to persecute, to bitterly hate some one”.
If, then, the words of Jesus are to be taken figuratively, it would appear that Christ had promised to His enemies eternal life and a glorious resurrection in recompense for the injuries and persecutions directed against Him.
The other phrase, “to drink some one’s blood”, in Scripture, especially, has no other figurative meaning than that of dire chastisement (cf. Is., xlix, 26; Apoc., xvi, 6); but, in the present text, this interpretation is just as impossible here as in the phrase, “to eat some one’s flesh”.
Consequently, eating and drinking are to be understood of the actual partaking of Christ in person, hence literally.
Here is the error spelled out ... this is a sacrilege. I hope you have eyes to see it for what it is.
(b) Proof from Tradition
As for the cogency of the argument from tradition, this historical fact is of decided significance, namely, that the dogma of the Real Presence remained, properly speaking, unmolested down to the time of the heretic Berengarius of Tours (d. 1088), and so could claim even at that time the uninterrupted possession of ten centuries. In the course of the dogma’s history there arose in general three great Eucharistic controversies, the first of which, begun by Paschasius Radbertus, in the ninth century, scarcely extended beyond the limits of his audience and concerned itself solely with the philosophical question, whether the Eucharistic Body of Christ is identical with the natural Body He had in Palestine and now has in heaven. Such a numerical identity could well have been denied by Ratramnus, Rabanus Maurus, Ratherius, Lanfranc, and others, since even nowadays a true, though accidental, distinction between the sacramental and the natural condition of Christ’s Body must be rigorously maintained. The first occasion for an official procedure on the part of the Church was offered when Berengarius of Tours, influenced by the writings of Scotus Eriugena (d. about 884), the first opponent of the Real Presence, rejected both the latter truth and that of Transubstantiation. He repaired, however, the public scandal he had given by a sincere retractation made in the presence of Pope Gregory VII at a synod held in Rome in 1079, and died reconciled to the Church. The third and the sharpest controversy was that opened by the Reformation in the sixteenth century, in regard to which it must be remarked that Luther was the only one among the Reformers who still clung to the old Catholic doctrine, and, though subjecting it to manifold misrepresentations, defended it most tenaciously. He was diametrically opposed by Zwingli of Zurich, who, as was seen above, reduced the Eucharist to an empty, meaningless symbol. Having gained over to his views such friendly contemporary partisans as Carlstadt, Bucer, and Oecolampadius, he later on secured influential allies in the Arminians, Mennonites, Socinians, and Anglicans, and even today the rationalistic conception of the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper does not differ substantially from that of the Zwinglians. In the meantime, at Geneva, Calvin was cleverly seeking to bring about a compromise between the extremes of the Lutheran literal and the Zwinglian figurative interpretations, by suggesting instead of the substantial presence in one case or the merely symbolical in the other, a certain mean, i.e. dynamic, presence, which consists essentially in this, that at the moment of reception, the efficacy of Christ’s Body and Blood is communicated from heaven to the souls of the predestined and spiritually nourishes them. Thanks to Melanchthon’s pernicious and dishonest double-dealing, this attractive intermediary position of Calvin made such an impression even in Lutheran circles that it was not until the Formula of Concord in 1577 that the “crypto-Calvinistic venom” was successfully rejected from the body of Lutheran doctrine. The Council of Trent met these widely divergent errors of the Reformation with the dogmatic definition, that the God-man is “truly, really, and substantially” present under the appearances of bread and wine, purposely intending thereby to oppose the expression vere to Zwingli’s signum, realiter to Oecolampadius’s figura, and essentialiter to Calvin’s virtus (Sess. XIII, can. i). And this teaching of the Council of Trent has ever been and is now the unwavering position of the whole of Catholic Christendom.
As regards the doctrine of the Fathers, it is not possible in the present article to multiply patristic texts, which are usually characterized by wonderful beauty and clearness. Suffice it to say that, besides the Didache (ix, x, xiv), the most ancient Fathers, as Ignatius (Ad. Smyrn., vii; Ad. Ephes., xx; Ad. Philad., iv), Justin (Apol., I, lxvi), Irenaeus (Adv. Haer., IV, xvii, 5; IV, xviii, 4; V, ii, 2), Tertullian (De resurrect. earn., viii; De pudic., ix; De orat., xix; De bapt., xvi), and Cyprian (De orat. dom., xviii; De lapsis, xvi), attest without the slightest shadow of a misunderstanding what is the faith of the Church, while later patristic theology bears witness to the dogma in terms that approach exaggeration, as Gregory of Nyssa (Orat. catech., xxxvii), Cyril of Jerusalem (Catech. myst., iv, 2 sqq.), and especially the Doctor of the Eucharist, Chrysostom [Hom. lxxxii (lxxxiii), in Matt., 1 sqq.; Hom. xlvi, in Joan., 2 sqq.; Hom. xxiv, in I Cor., 1 sqq.; Hom. ix, de poenit., 1], to whom may be added the Latin Fathers, Hilary (De Trinit., VIII, iv, 13) and Ambrose (De myst., viii, 49; ix, 51 sq.). Concerning the Syriac Fathers, see Th. Lamy, “De Syrorum fide in re eucharisticae” (Louvain, 1859). The position held by St. Augustine is at present the subject of a spirited controversy, since the adversaries of the Church rather confidently maintain that he favored their side of the question in that he was an out-and-out “Symbolist”. In the opinion of Loofs (”Dogmengeschichte”, 4th ed., Halle, 1906, p. 409), St. Augustine never gives the “reception of the true Body and Blood of Christ” a thought; and this view Ad. Harnack (Dogmengeschichte, 3rd ed., Freiburg, 1897, III, 148) emphasizes when he declares that St. Augustine “undoubtedly was one in this respect with the so-called pre-Reformation and with Zwingli”. Against this rather hasty conclusion Catholics first of all advance the undoubted fact that Augustine demanded that Divine worship should be rendered to the Eucharistic Flesh (In Ps. xxxiii, enarr., i, 10), and declared that at the Last Supper “Christ held and carried Himself in His own hands” (In Ps. xcviii, n. 9). They insist, and rightly so, that it is not fair to separate this great Doctor’s teaching concerning the Eucharist from his doctrine of the Holy Sacrifice, since he clearly and unmistakably asserts that the true Body and Blood are offered in the Holy Mass. The variety of extreme views just mentioned requires that an attempt be made at a reasonable and unbiased explanation, whose verification is to be sought for and found in the acknowledged fact that a gradual process of development took place in the mind of St. Augustine. No one will deny that certain expressions occur in Augustine as forcibly realistic as those of Tertullian and Cyprian or of his intimate literary friends, Ambrose, Optatus of Mileve, Hilary, and Chrysostom. On the other hand, it is beyond question that, owing to the determining influence of Origen and the Platonic philosophy, which, as is well known, attached but slight value to visible matter and the sensible phenomena of the world, Augustine did not refer what was properly real (res) in the Blessed Sacrament to the Flesh of Christ (caro), but transferred it to the quickening principle (spiritus), i.e. to the effects produced by a worthy Communion. A logical consequence of this was that he allowed to caro, as the vehicle and antitype of res, not indeed a mere symbolical worth, but at best a transitory, intermediary, and subordinate worth (signum), and placed the Flesh and Blood of Christ, present under the appearances (figuroe) of bread and wine, in too decided an opposition to His natural, historical Body. Since Augustine was a strenuous defender of personal cooperation and effort in the work of salvation and an enemy to mere mechanical activity and superstitious routine, he omitted insisting upon a lively faith in the real personality of Jesus in the Eucharist, and called attention to the spiritual efficiency of the Flesh of Christ instead. His mental vision was fixed, not so much upon the saving caro, as upon the spiritus, which alone possessed worth. Nevertheless a turning-point occurred in his life. The conflict with Pelagianism and the diligent perusal of Chrysostom freed him from the bondage of Platonism, and he thenceforth attached to caro a separate, individual value independent of that of spiritus, going so far, in fact, as to maintain too strongly that the Communion of children was absolutely necessary to salvation. If, moreover, the reader finds in some of the other Fathers difficulties, obscurities, and a certain inaccuracy of expression, this may be explained on three general grounds: (I) because of the peace and security there is in their possession of the Church’s truth, whence resulted a certain want of accuracy in their terminology; (2) because of the strictness with which the Discipline of the Secret, expressly concerned with the Holy Eucharist, was maintained in the East until the end of the fifth, in the West down to the middle of the sixth, century; (3) because of the preference of many Fathers for the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, which was especially in vogue in the Alexandrian School (Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Cyril), but which found a salutary counterpoise in the emphasis laid on the literal interpretation by the School of Antioch (Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret). Since, however, the allegorical sense of the Alexandrians did not exclude the literal, but rather supposed it as a working basis, the realistic phraseology of Clement (Paed., I, vi), of Origen (Contra Celsum, VIII, xiii, 32; Hom. ix, in Levit., x), and of Cyril (In Matt., xxvi, xxvii; Contra Nestor., IV, 5) concerning the Real Presence is readily accounted for. (For the solution of patristic difficulties, see Pohle, “Dogmatik”, 3rd ed., Paderborn, 1908, III, 209 sqq.)
The argument from tradition is supplemented and completed by the argument from prescription, which traces the constant belief in the dogma of the Real Presence through the Middle Ages back to the early Apostolic Church, and thus proves the anti-Eucharistic heresies to have been capricious novelties and violent ruptures of the true faith as handed down from the beginning. Passing over the interval that has elapsed since the Reformation, as this period receives its entire character from the Council of Trent, we have for the time of the Reformation the important testimony of Luther (Wider etliche Rottengeister, 1532) for the fact that the whole of Christendom then believed in the Real Presence. And this firm, universal belief can be traced back uninterruptedly to Berengarius of Tours (d. 1088), in fact—omitting the sole exception of Scotus Eriugena—to Paschasius Radbertus (831). On these grounds, therefore, we may proudly maintain that the Church has been in legitimate possession of this dogma for fully eleven centuries. When Photius started the Greek Schism in 869, he took over to his Church the inalienable treasure of the Catholic Eucharist, a treasure which the Greeks, in the negotiations for reunion at Lyons in 1274 and at Florence in 1439, could show to be still intact, and which they vigorously defended in the schismatical Synod of Jerusalem (1672) against the sordid machinations of the Calvinistic-minded Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Constantinople (1629). From this it follows conclusively that the Catholic dogma must be much older than the Eastern Schism under Photius. In fact, even the Nestorians and Monophysites, who broke away from Rome in the fifth century, have, as is evident from their literature and liturgical books, preserved their faith in the Eucharist as unwaveringly as the Greeks, and this in spite of the dogmatic difficulties which, on account of their denial of the hypostatic union, stood in the way of a clear and correct notion of the Real Presence. Therefore the Catholic dogma is at least as old as Nestorianism (431 A.D.). But is it not of even greater antiquity? To decide this question one has only to examine the oldest Liturgies of the Mass, whose essential elements date back to the time of the Apostles (see articles on the various liturgies), to visit the Roman Catacombs (see Roman Catacombs), where Christ is shown as present in the Eucharistic food under the symbol of a fish (see Early Symbols of the Eucharist), to decipher the famous Inscription of Abercius of the second century, which, though composed under the influence of the Discipline of the Secret, plainly attests the faith of that age. And thus the argument from prescription carries us back to the dim and distant past and thence to the time of the Apostles, who in turn could have received their faith in the Real Presence from no one but Christ Himself.
(2) The Totality of the Real Presence
In order to forestall at the very outset the unworthy notion, that in the Eucharist we receive merely the Body and merely the Blood of Christ but not Christ in His entirety, the Council of Trent defined the Real Presence to be such as to include with Christ’s Body and Blood His Soul and Divinity as well. A strictly logical conclusion from the words of promise: “he that eateth me, the same also shall live by me”, this Totality of Presence was also the constant property of tradition, which characterized the partaking of separated parts of the Savior as a sarcophagy (flesh-eating) altogether derogatory to God. Although the separation of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Logos, is, absolutely speaking, within the almighty power of God, yet their actual inseparability is firmly established by the dogma of the indissolubility of the hypostatic union of Christ’s Divinity and Humanity. In case the Apostles had celebrated the Lord’s Supper during the triduum mortis (the time during which Christ’s Body was in the tomb), when a real separation took place between the constitutive elements of Christ, there would have been really present in the Sacred Host only the bloodless, inanimate Body of Christ as it lay in the tomb, and in the Chalice only the Blood separated from His Body and absorbed by the earth as it was shed, both the Body and the Blood, however, remaining hypostatically united to His Divinity, while His Soul, which sojourned in Limbo, would have remained entirely excluded from the Eucharistic presence. This unreal, though not impossible, hypothesis, is well calculated to throw light upon the essential difference designated by the Council of Trent (Sess. XIII, c. iii), between the meanings of the words ex vi verborum and per concomitantiam. By virtue of the words of Consecration, or ex vi verborum, that only is made present which is expressed by the words of Institution, namely the Body and the Blood of Christ. But by reason of a natural concomitance (per concomitantiam), there becomes simultaneously present all that which is physically inseparable from the parts just named, and which must, from a natural connection with them, always be their accompaniment. Now, the glorified Christ, Who “dieth now no more” (Rom., vi, 9), has an animate Body through whose veins courses His life’s Blood under the vivifying influence of the soul. Consequently, together with His Body and Blood and Soul, His whole Humanity also, and, by virtue of the hypostatic union, His Divinity, i.e. Christ whole and entire, must be present. Hence Christ is present in the sacrament with His Flesh and Blood, Body and Soul, Humanity and Divinity.
This general and fundamental principle, which entirely abstracts from the duality of the species, must, nevertheless, be extended to each of the species of bread and wine. For we do not receive in the Sacred Host one part of Christ and in the Chalice the other, as though our reception of the totality depended upon our partaking of both forms; on the contrary, under the appearance of bread alone, as well as under the appearance of wine alone, we receive Christ whole and entire (cf. Council of Trent, Sess. XIII, can. iii). This, the only reasonable conception, finds its Scriptural verification in the fact, that St. Paul (I Cor., xi, 27, 29) attaches the same guilt “of the body and the blood of the Lord” to the unworthy “eating or drinking”, understood in a disjunctive sense, as he does to “eating and drinking”, understood in a copulative sense. The traditional foundation for this is to be found in the testimony of the Fathers and of the Church’s liturgy, according to which the glorified Savior can be present on our altars only in His totality and integrity, and not divided into parts or distorted to the form of a monstrosity. It follows, therefore, that supreme adoration is separately due to the Sacred Host and to the consecrated contents of the Chalice. On this last truth are based especially the permissibility and intrinsic propriety of Communion only under one kind for the laity and for priests not celebrating Mass (see Communion under Both Kinds). But in particularizing upon the dogma, we are naturally led to the further truth, that, at least after the actual division of either Species into parts, Christ is present in each part in His full and entire essence. If the Sacred Host be broken into pieces or if the consecrated Chalice be drunk in small quantities, Christ in His entirety is present in each particle and in each drop. By the restrictive clause, separatione factae, the Council of Trent (Sess. XIII, can. iii) rightly raised this truth to the dignity of a dogma. While from Scripture we may only judge it improbable that Christ consecrated separately each particle of the bread He had broken, we know with certainty, on the other hand, that He blessed the entire contents of the Chalice and then gave it to His disciples to be partaken of distributively (cf. Matt., xxvi, 27 sq.; Mark, xiv, 23). It is only on the basis of the Tridentine dogma that we can understand how Cyril of Jerusalem (Catech. myst. v, n. 21) obliged communicants to observe the most scrupulous care in conveying the Sacred Host to their mouths, so that not even “a crumb, more precious than gold or jewels”, might fall from their hands to the ground; how Caesarius of Arles taught that there is “just as much in the small fragment as in the whole”; how the different liturgies assert the abiding integrity of the “indivisible Lamb”, in spite of the “division of the Host”; and, finally, how in actual practice the faithful partook of the broken particles of the Sacred Host and drank in common from the same cup.
While the three foregoing theses contain dogmas of faith, there is a fourth proposition which is merely a theological conclusion, namely, that even before the actual division of the Species, Christ is present wholly and entirely in each particle of the still unbroken Host and in each drop of the collective contents of the Chalice. For were not Christ present in His entire Personality in every single particle of the Eucharistic Species even before their division took place, we should be forced to conclude that it is the process of dividing which brings about the Totality of Presence, whereas according to the teaching of the Church the operative cause of the Real and Total Presence is to be found in Transubstantiation alone. No doubt this last conclusion directs the attention of philosophical and scientific inquiry to a mode of existence peculiar to the Eucharistic Body, which is contrary to the ordinary laws of experience. It is, indeed, one of those sublime mysteries, concerning which speculative theology attempts to offer various solutions [see below under (5)].
From Catholic answers: http://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/eucharist
True salvation comes by believing, not by eating Jesus.
If eating and drinking were really the way to live forever, then why do Catholics die?
Why does it need to be repeated all the time? Once isn’t good enough? That would be saying that Christ’s atonement isn’t as powerful as the sin that Catholics claim make us lose it.
All of this parsing does not remove the commandment from God to not ever eat the blood, to never drink the blood, for the life is in the blood. [Gen 6; Leviticus 3:17]
A priest man cannot hold God's LIFE in a cup of wine. THE LIFE IN CHRIST'S BLOOD was spread upon the Mercy Seat, never poured out into a catholic cup.
Jesus ate the same bread He gave to His disciples, and drank from the same cup He offered to them to pass among them. Are you familiar enough with scriptures to recall where Jesus referred to a cup His disciples would drink from? [ HINT: Matt 20:22 and following; Mark 10:38 and following ]
Is the following divine metaphor or literal drinking? ... Matthew 26:42 He went away again the second time, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done. ... John 18:11 Then said Jesus unto Peter, Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?
Well; the Koran surely illustrates THIS point!
But when our Lord praised it, He was speaking of His own flesh, and He had said, “Except a man eat My flesh, he shall have no life in him.” John 6:54 Some disciples of His, about seventy, were offended, and said, “This is an hard saying, who can hear it?” And they went back, and walked no more with Him. It seemed unto them hard that He said, “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, you have no life in you:” they received it foolishly, they thought of it carnally, and imagined that the Lord would cut off parts from His body, and give unto them; and they said, “This is a hard saying.” It was they who were hard, not the saying; for unless they had been hard, and not meek, they would have said unto themselves, He says not this without reason, but there must be some latent mystery herein. They would have remained with Him, softened, not hard: and would have learned that from Him which they who remained, when the others departed, learned. For when twelve disciples had remained with Him, on their departure, these remaining followers suggested to Him, as if in grief for the death of the former, that they were offended by His words, and turned back. But He instructed them, and says unto them, “It is the Spirit that quickens, but the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” John 6:63 Understand spiritually what I have said; you are not to eat this body which you see; nor to drink that blood which they who will crucify Me shall pour forth. I have commended unto you a certain mystery; spiritually understood, it will quicken. Although it is needful that this be visibly celebrated, yet it must be spiritually understood.But notice that nothing in the above passage confirms transubstantiation. Quite the opposite. Augustine is explicit. "You are not to eat this body which you see..." This is something that to give life must be spiritually, and not carnally, understood. Again, you could preach that from any Baptist pulpit and be warmly received.
Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801099.htm
Now he is in bondage to a sign who uses, or pays homage to, any significant object without knowing what it signifies: he, on the other hand, who either uses or honors a useful sign divinely appointed, whose force and significance he understands, does not honor the sign which is seen and temporal, but that to which all such signs refer. Now such a man is spiritual and free even at the time of his bondage, when it is not yet expedient to reveal to carnal minds those signs by subjection to which their carnality is to be overcome. To this class of spiritual persons belonged the patriarchs and the prophets, and all those among the people of Israel through whose instrumentality the Holy Spirit ministered unto us the aids and consolations of the Scriptures. But at the present time, after that the proof of our liberty has shone forth so clearly in the resurrection of our Lord, we are not oppressed with the heavy burden of attending even to those signs which we now understand, but our Lord Himself, and apostolic practice, have handed down to us a few rites in place of many, and these at once very easy to perform, most majestic in their significance, and most sacred in the observance; such, for example, as the sacrament of baptism, and the celebration of the body and blood of the Lord. And as soon as any one looks upon these observances he knows to what they refer, and so reveres them not in carnal bondage, but in spiritual freedom. Now, as to follow the letter, and to take signs for the things that are signified by them, is a mark of weakness and bondage; so to interpret signs wrongly is the result of being misled by error. He, however, who does not understand what a sign signifies, but yet knows that it is a sign, is not in bondage. And it is better even to be in bondage to unknown but useful signs than, by interpreting them wrongly, to draw the neck from under the yoke of bondage only to insert it in the coils of error.As for Tertullian, it is merely projection of later developed doctrine to suggest he embraced transubstantiation. In fact, as you yourself mention, the best way to understand what he said is see it in context to his debate with Marcion. The notion of a figure is that in the Platonic model of reality, for every type there is an antitype, not meaning the opposite of something, but the higher reality for which the type stands. In this model, both are real and have their own true substance. The bread and the wine continue to exist as such. But they point to a higher reality that must be fully real on it's own for the figure to be true.
Then, having taken the bread and given it to His disciples, He made it His own body, by saying, This is my body, that is, the figure of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been, unless there were first a veritable bodyThe above statement is something any evangelical or Protestant would agree with. It is perfectly true, and has absolutely no bearing on the much later appearance of the transubstantive novelty invented by Radbertus and refined by Aquinas.
Constituting, therefore, His word as the life-giving principle, because that word is spirit and life, He likewise called His flesh by the same appellation; because, too, the Word had become flesh, John 1:14 we ought therefore to desire Him in order that we may have life, and to devour Him with the ear, and to ruminate on Him with the understanding, and to digest Him by faith.How can "devouring Him with the ear" be anything but a metaphor? So this "trago can't be a metaphor because it's too intense" argument is flat out wrong. Intensity is fine, even in the metaphors of John 6.
Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0316.htm
And he said, Be it far from me, O LORD, that I should do this: is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives? therefore he would not drink it. These things did these three mighty men.So we see that David, in using this metaphor, was giving honor to those warriors of his who had risked their lives for their king, even in this small pleasure.
(2 Samuel 23:17)