Posted on 07/09/2015 9:33:36 AM PDT by RnMomof7
He commands us to eat His Body and Blood. His words are unmistakeable.
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.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you 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.
Christ literally gives Himself to us as real food and real drink. There's nothing to misinterpret here. There's no room for manoeuvre.
Moreover: when we consider the language used in the Gospel of John, the literal interpretation becomes undeniable.
In John 6:50-53 Christ's words are translated using various forms of the Greek verb phago, 'eating.' As in 'Sarcophagus'.
However after the Jews begin to express incredulity at the idea of eating Christ’s flesh, His language intensified.
In verse 54, John begins to use trogo instead of phago. Trogo is a decidedly more graphic term, meaning 'to chew on' or to 'gnaw on'—as when an animal is ripping apart its prey. The text is closer to:
Whoever gnaws on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.
If anything more needed to be said: St Paul is also abundantly clear
Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.
All this: not to mention Christ's institution of what we now call the Eucharist at the Last Supper.
From Luke:
And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood."
If any corroborating evidence were needed, St Paul speaks about the Eucharist in Corinthians.
And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
I quote these to show that Christ's Body and Blood were eaten and drunk in the very early Church.
Do not separate yourself from the Body and Blood of Christ! He commands you to eat of Him, or 'you will not have life within you'.
How could it be cannibalism to eat of the Living God?
How could eating and drinking of He who Is Uttermost Reality break a dietary code?
I knew the minute he referred to the anathema that we were in for a ride. What has the anathema to do with the dogma itself?
It is clear from our calling one of those crucified with Jesus “SAINT” Dismas that we do NOT hold that right belief or right reception of the Blessed Sacrament is absolutely necessary for salvation. So before he gets to the dogma he has already said a thing (1) that is not true, and (2) that supports the common and, to my mind, false because over-simplified accusation that the Catholic Church believes in salvation by works. Again, St. Dismas suffices to show that that is not so.
So, at the very kindest, we must conclude that he is not careful or precise and that his statements about Catholic teaching are unreliable.
Even his characterization of Zwingli is similarly simplistic. Zwingli did not say the Eucharist was something the worshippers did, a memorial and a proclamation only. There was a line of thought, hinted at in Cranmer and developed by Hooker that is sometimes glibly called “Real Presence in the Believer,” and sometimes, more seriously, “Virtualism.”
When I read Cranmer on the Eucharist, 40 years ago, I came away with the sense that philosophy had not kept up (and maybe shouldn't have tried) with the thinking of the Reformers. At the time I tended to the Cranmer/Hooker account, if that matters. I was not looking for arguments against it, but for support.
Now, to me, the best and most interesting part of his paper is the argument from the Chalcedonian Definition of the Hypostatic Union.
I would criticize it 3 ways.
1) He stresses the division of natures at the expense of the union in one person. It's easy to stumble on the right dogma of WHAT IHS XP was. I'm certainly never completely confident!
But, as the definition says, you must NEITHER confuse the divine and human nature or substance NOR divide the one person. And once you have someone who appears in upper rooms, the doors being locked for fear of the Jews, some questions about the “locus” of the Risen Lord remain unresolvably mysterious.
(2) But again, as he divides the person, he also shows a one-sided understanding of time and space. In particular, in his consideration of the Last Supper he gives more importance to the sequence of events than I think correct.
Yes, Aquinas suggests that the “body” of the Last Supper was not the Risen Body. So time and sequence matter somewhat. But I propose that every act of God's has always been salvific, FROM the creation of light, the separation of dry-land and water, the provision of food, THROUGH the events of the most holy three days since time began, to the, somewhere, person who accepts Christ as I type or you read this.
The salvific act of causing plants to grow and that of casting the stars from heaven, and everything in between, is, so to speak, powered by the Triduum Sacrum. The effects of the Cross are not bound by the flow of time. God is Melech haOlam, the king of time, not its subject. And his mercies endure forever, for ALL ages. And he was merciful when there was not yet light. And will be merciful when the sun no longer shines.
(3) Protestant thought seems to me to suffer from a very unscriptural and unreasonable understanding of basic matters, like the Biblical relationship between soul and body. If the proper state of the human is the union of soul and body, and if Resurrection is the proper or intended state, then Jesus, united with Divinity, brings a body to that union.
Now, unless God is diminished by the Resurrection — an absurd thought — then he is still omnipresent. And if Jesus is true God he is also omnipresent. So the resurrected body is omnipresent. So being present, sacramentally (whatever that means) shouldn't be the problem this writer makes it out to be.
Because what Christ spoke of was not literal. God forbids eating human flesh. Period. Christ spoke of a symbolic ingestion of His words so that they became an active part of the believer.
How could eating and drinking of He who Is Uttermost Reality break a dietary code?
Symbolism. Unless you honestly believe that eating a steak will make you a cow. We are to digest Christ's words and live out our lives accordingly. Becoming Christ-like in our thoughts and deeds.
There is is!
Rome picks and choose which parts of the words of Jesus to be literal and allegorical.
Thank you very much for this post.
A yearly meal of REMEMBERANCE.
Most folks recognize it as the PASSOVER meal.
You've got to IGNORE Jesus' words 37 verses earlier to continue on with the Transubstantiation Theory...
Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us
The Jews were commanded to eat the Passover Lamb. How then could eating the Passover Lamb be against the law?
When we eat Christ we fulfill the Mosaic Law.
Indeed, we fulfill it more than even Solomon or David - or Moses! - ever had a chance to during their lifetimes. We do not break it, and Christ is not asking us to.
Mumbo-Jumbo.
Elsie of FreeRepublic, July 9th, 2015 AD
So - when the One He has sent asks you to eat His Body and drink His blood, why don't you take Him at His word?
Why not, you know, believe Him?
John 4:14
...but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.
Where will we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life.
Galatians 3:10 (ASV)
For as many as are of the works of the law are under a curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one who continueth not in all things that are written in the book of the law, to do them.
Within the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, this would translate to Christ being a sheep. Literally an ovine. Gonna go there?
Christ fulfilled the law, not us. To say otherwise is to claim that we can save ourselves.
If He had, we would celebrate that sacrament.
But He didn't. This is why no-one celebrates a sacrament of drinking water today.
But - at the Last Supper - Christ did institute the sacrament of His Body and Blood. He spoke in metaphor about living water - but he spoke literally about His body and blood.
He commands us to eat His Body and Blood. His words are unmistakeable.
Why do you not believe? He offers you His Body and Blood.
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Not a sheep. Christ is THE sacrificial lamb. The one and only sacrifice to God, both priest and victim.
Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!
and also:
And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.
and of course:
Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed for us.
The cannibalsim argument proceeds from a misunderstanding of what substance is. What a cannibal eats is the accidents of a body, not its substance.
Thank you for those kind words.
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