I am like the diner (of your imagination---you are making it personal) who only reads the menu?
You know this---how?
Please, don't personalize the discussion. You don't know me at all, and likely would be quite surprised if you did know.
Otherwise, my point stands, at least in that you have in no way refuted it. To the contrary, all which you have written back to me, confirms it.
They hold the threat of excommunication, and along with it the threat of being barred communion, which can be reasonably inferred, if not is outright taught, is tantamount to complete, hopeless separation from Christ (mealy-mouthed explanatory escape clauses, notwithstanding).
I can tell you, on a personal level (since you seem to insist on making it personal) that the Spirit of the Lord can be found to be present, outside of the narrow confines of a certain group's theological practice. Even --- at or during a rite of "communion".
I cannot help but to think that this palpable presence of the Lord during such rite, may have lead to all the gilded explanation which grew up surrounding such, many years after the earthly lives of the original apostles had ended. For the original apostles themselves left us no (other-than biblical) record or "extra" explanation, stipulating the spiritual particulars of the rite, much less such extensive wordiness as in later centuries grew up surrounding it.
google st. ignatius. he was a bishop of Antioch and was personally taught by the Apostle John. There were unbelievers in his day as well called the Gnostics. St. Ignatius wrote around the year 100ad, that the Gnostics did not take “communion”, since they denied it was the Body of Christ. Now, this man was personally taught by St John, here you are 1,900 years later and you will deny the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist? St. Ignatius was martyred in the Roman Coliseum for his Faith. But not only St. Ignatius taught this, ALL the Church Fathers believed it and more importantly of course, Jesus said it. “This is My Body” Unless your Bible says “This REPRESENTS My Body”.
Witha few minor qualifications, if you aren’t Catholic or Orthodox, you don’t have a sacramental priesthood. Given that you attacked the sacramental priesthood as imposing itself between God and man in post 123, and refer to God as a “wafer” in post 198, and I hold beliefs contrary, which in at least the second case were already evident, things were already somewhat personalized prior to the post.
I would be quite suprised if you made daily holy hours, were an ardent RC or Orthodox, or were a continuing Anglican. I would also be suprised if you were Jewish or a Mormon.
There is a big line between those who hold for a fuller sacramental system and those who don’t. Either you are right, and in a little more than two hours I will be prostrating myself before a wafer, or I am right, and those holding on to the Bible but rejecting the sacramental system are, to develop the analogy a bit farther, sitting in McDonalds cherishing a Waldorf-Astoria menu while being convinced that the Waldorf-Astoria is evil—they may even order a chickenburger with cheese thinking that it is what the menu means by cordon-bleu.
I will pray for you, and ask you to pray for me. A great deal is made to ride on John 6.
In my experience, you are much more likely to get thrown out of a protestant Church than be threatened with formal excommunication in the Catholic Church—which is to say that I have known protestants that have been tossed from their churchs, while now days Catholics get formally excommunicated at a rate of about one per hundred million per year—mostly for participating in fake ordinations, though occasionally for writing works deemed heretical and refusing to clarify or recant after years of back and forth dialogue.
As to what the apostles left—everything of significant length which survived in writing into the third century was eventually incorporated into the Bible, but their followers did not undergo mind cleansing upon the apostles’ deaths, and surely would continue doing what the apostles had been doing. Some of what the liturgy preserves has roots in the synagogue,and so we may be morally certain came through the apostles adapted in a way appropriate for Christian worship. For example, right before the “Eucharistic Prayer” or “Canon” (prayer of institution might be a more familiar term in your tradition—I’m not sure) every single one of the 17 different liturgical rites—stretching from Spain to Ethiopia to India, sing (or recite) Isaiah 6:3—which just happens to be the verse chanted in the synagogue immediately preceding the removal of the Torah from the ark and the reading of the Torah passage, which is the height of the synagogue service. In the RC latin tradition, the word “Sabaoth” has even survived in the chant, a Hebrew word which may be translated a number of different ways, and so in some ways is best left untranslated when people still have some knowledge of Hebrew. I don’t think a 4th century Pope with no knowledge of Hebrew composed this prayer and forced it on the west and somehow convinced the Christians in India who trace themselves back to St. Thomas, and those in Persia who, politically, were trying to distance themselves from the Roman Empire, to stick the prayer into their services. Rather, those in the apostolic age saw that this portion of the liturgy entered into the true Holy of Holies and took that chant from their heritage that would best bring out this belief. Other than a precursor of the massad systematically infiltrating all of these Christian communities, many of which were only in the loosest of contact with others from the late 1st century on, the apostolic origin of this portion of the liturgy seems to me the only rational explanation. One could try for a systematic misinterpretation of Rev 4:8, but Rev was received late in the East, with suspiscion, and only half-heartedly (at least some of the Orthodox refuse to use this book liturgically) so it is virtually certain that the Rev passage commented on existing worship, rather than was misunderstood at a later point to deform the tradition.
The spirit of the Lord does blow everywhere, but it blows toward one destination, and in a consistent way. I wish you well and will pray for you on your journey. At the same time, the debate over wafer or God is not an insignificant one—and to call my God a wafer is something personal, though I do not take it as a personal attack. My analogies deal with the issue, and while everyone who reads into them will have a personal stake, that is because all are involved with the issues. Maybe the Waldorf-Astoria is only good for its menus.