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I appreciate your response, but I fear it is you who has misread both Scripture and Augustine.

First I would ask you this: Did Augustine's "coals of fire" have dual application too? No, obviously not. He is not saying the coals of fire are both figurative and literal at the same time in the same way. And if this is so, it is irrational to make an exception the other metaphors about which he teaches here. He specifically identifies the problem with eating literal flesh as seeming to invite us to a criminal act. Notice he does not use the typical modern Catholic polemic of attempting to excuse the act, to say that God has left off the prohibition to consume human flesh and blood. If so, he would not be arguing it was criminal.

Instead, in support of finding a figure, he tells us no criminal act is implied, and so we may look for a metaphor.

But you seem to think Augustine was trying to have it both ways on this issue, right within this very text. Scanning the text, I can find nothing in it that corresponds to your theory that he was somehow concerned with cutting off parts of the body of Christ. Nothing like that at all. Now I don't say Augustine never said such a thing. But you have represented that your alleged real-presence confirming elements are in this very text, as part of it's context, and I say that is not the case.

I suggest caution here. Unless I am mistaken, it gets dangerously close to a violation of forum rules to misrepresent the content of sources.

However, in your defense, I did find this in Augustine's treatment of Psalm 99:

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.

Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801099.htm

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.

But going back to his treatise, "On Christian Doctrine," there is nothing remotely like what you suggest. Rather, he doubles down on the full measure of distinction between the sign and the thing signified, and marks it out as weakness to confuse the two, to treat them as if they were really the same thing:

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.

And that is Tertullian's whole point. Jesus did have a real body, so having the bread and wine as figure of that body makes sense if and only if that body was itself real. As he says:

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

The 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.

As for your voluminous quote from Catholic Answers, it is all old and tired material, presented and refuted probably hundreds of times already in this forum. Therefore I hope you will forgive me if in the interest of brevity I dispense with it in a summary rebuttal:

1) God can do miracles. Duh. Yes, we get that. We have in many cases even experienced such miracles ourselves, so we know God can do anything. But there's a big gap between knowing what God can do and insisting He did something with zero evidence of said act. Zero evidence.

2) Parsing the passage into however many different heavenly breads does absolutely nothing to advance transubstantiation. The article's argument is riddled with unsupportable conjecture presented as conclusion. In law school such conclusory answers routinely were graded as Fs, because they do nothing but express an opinion. They do not show what the text actually teaches.

3) Trogo. Chewing versus merely eating. As the below article discusses, this again does nothing to support a literal understanding of the contested statements in John 6:

For a more in-depth view, see this: http://fallibility.blogspot.ca/2013/08/to-eat-to-chew-and-to-eschew-romes.html

In short form, there are at least three flaws in the RC argument that the word for eating ("trogo", supposedly, "to chew") signals an exit from metaphor.

A) First, no physical act or object, however vivid, is excluded from potentially being used as metaphor. That reflects a misunderstanding of what metaphor is. In fact, the more vivid the imagery, the better the metaphor. And the more original, the better. There is no rule that it must have been done this way before. All that is needed is something to represent and something by which to represent it. The rest is up to the God-given ability we all have to recognize metaphor.

B) Second, per the linked article above, the word trogo was by the time of John's Gospel becoming a common substitute for eating, and it may be an etymological fallacy to assign it anything beyond that sense, just ordinary eating.

C) But even if we accept the hypothesis that trogo is more intense, Tertullian himself demonstrates this intensified sense of spiritually consuming Christ, not in bland terms, but in such vivid terms as to show the urgency of the believer in seeking union with Christ:

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.

Available here: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0316.htm

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.

4) What about the already existing Hebrew metaphors, wherein eating a person's flesh or drinking their blood was a metaphor for strong hostility toward that person?

For a more in-depth view, see this: http://fallibility.blogspot.com/2014/02/eating-flesh-and-drinking-blood.html

Here's the "executive summary:"

The existence of a negative metaphor does not preclude the creative conversion of such a metaphor to something positive. God can do as He wishes, right? So, as the article points out, it is a false dilemma to suggest that there are only two choices, either a negative metaphor, or a literal meaning, because there is a third option, a positive metaphor, one describing an intense and life-sustaining belief in Jesus, that is just as possible. It depends on the structure of the text itself. Does it meet the criteria for metaphor? If so, then let it say what it says, even if it isn't what you were expecting.

But most compellingly, the notion of drinking someone's blood is not always presented in strictly negative terms:

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.
(2 Samuel 23:17)

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.

But there is another layer to this. The positive sense of the metaphor, that we must believe in Jesus to have eternal life, would not have come about unless Jesus had been rejected of men, and His body broken, and His blood shed, by men who did indeed hate him. In that sense we have a metaphor of amazing beauty and power, in that out of the darkness of condemnation under the law, Christ in giving himself to be reviled of men, transformed that darkness into the glorious light of His Gospel, that we can be saved by believing in Him, and what He has done for us in His love for us.

Conclusion:

It was good of you to attempt some meaningful refutation. I appreciate it. In the end, however, you have not succeeded. The best read of John 6 remains this: If we are to enjoy eternal life with God the Father, we must come to Jesus, and must receive Him by faith as Messiah and Son of God, must receive that by His wounds we are healed. His words are spirit, and they are life.

Peace,

SR

Here is wisdom.

Amen

Your comment:”1) God can do miracles. Duh. Yes, we get that. We have in many cases even experienced such miracles ourselves, so we know God can do anything. But there’s a big gap between knowing what God can do and insisting He did something with zero evidence of said act. Zero evidence.”

Perhaps you just don’t believe in the words of Jesus?
You can believe whatever you want.

I do believe in the teachings of Jesus. Even if some Catholics do not fully believe in the transubstantiation, that is their belief, not the teaching of Jesus and His Catholic Church.

For your information there are Eucharist miracles:
Over a 100 recorded miracles
1730 Siena Italy
1263 German priest
1331 Blano, France
1247 Santarem Portugal
1649 Eten Peru
6th century Palestine as told by St Zosimus
1433 Avigon, France
700 Lanciano, Italy
2008 Bialystok,Poland
2013 Mexico

There are some interesting stories. Including parting of the Jordan River so that a woman could receive the Eucharist, how a church was kept from being flooded. Based on scientific examination of soiled hosts, it was determined to be blood and heart muscle. Type AB positive.

Check out Catholic answers and Free Republic. Some of these stories have been posted on FR.

I can understand that people do not believe and question things, but I also read some convoluted reasoning to support their position.

It does require faith in Jesus Christ and His teachings and the understanding that he delegated to the Catholic Church to Go forth Baptize and teach all nations...