Posted on 01/21/2011 12:26:40 PM PST by marshmallow
The Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist is a real stumbling block to some Protestants who are seriously considering Catholicism. It was for me too, until I explored the subject, historically and scripturally. What follows is a summary of my deliberations.
Catholicism holds that bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ when they are consecrated by the priest celebrating the Mass. Oftentimes non-Catholics get hung up on the term transubstantiation, the name for the philosophical theory that the Church maintains best accounts for the change at consecration. The Church’s explanation of transubstantiation was influenced by Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accident.
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), like most philosophers of his time, wanted to account for how things change and yet remain the same. So, for example, a “substance” like an oak tree remains the same while undergoing “accidental” changes. It begins as an acorn and eventually develops roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves. During all these changes, the oak tree remains identical to itself. Its leaves change from green to red and brown, and eventually fall off. But these accidental changes occur while the substance of the tree remains.
On the other hand, if we chopped down the tree and turned into a desk, that would be a substantial change, since the tree would literally cease to be and its parts would be turned into something else, a desk. According to the Church, when the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, the accidents of the bread and wine do not change, but the substance of each changes. So, it looks, tastes, feels, and smells like bread and wine, but it literally has been changed into the body and blood of Christ. That’s transubstantiation.
There are several reasons why it would be a mistake to dismiss transubstantiation simply because of the influence of Aristotle on its formulation. First, Eastern Churches in communion with the Catholic Church rarely employ this Aristotelian language, and yet the Church considers their celebration of the Eucharist perfectly valid. Second, the Catholic Church maintains that the divine liturgies celebrated in the Eastern Churches not in communion with Rome (commonly called “Eastern Orthodoxy”) are perfectly valid as well, even though the Eastern Orthodox rarely employ the term transubstantiation. Third, the belief that the bread and wine are literally transformed into Christ’s body and blood predates Aristotle’s influence on the Church’s theology by over 1000 years. For it was not until the thirteenth century, and the ascendancy of St. Thomas Aquinas’ thought, that Aristotle’s categories were employed by the Church in its account of the Eucharist. In fact, when the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) employed the language of substantial change, St. Thomas had not even been born!
It was that third point that I found so compelling and convinced me that the Catholic view of the Eucharist was correct. It did not take long for me to see that Eucharistic realism (as I like to call it) had been uncontroversially embraced deep in Christian history. This is why Protestant historian, J. N. D. Kelly, writes: “Eucharistic teaching, it should be understood at the outset, was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Savior’s body and blood.” I found it in many of the works of the Early Church Fathers, including St. Ignatius of Antioch (A.D. 110), St. Justin Martyr (A.D. 151), St. Cyprian of Carthage, (A. D. 251), First Council of Nicaea (A. D. 325), St. Cyril of Jerusalem (A. D. 350), and St. Augustine of Hippo (A. D. 411) . These are, of course, not the only Early Church writings that address the nature of the Eucharist. But they are representative.
This should, however, not surprise us, given what the Bible says about the Lord’s Supper. When Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples (Mt. 26:17-30; Mk. 14:12-25; Lk. 22:7-23), which we commemorate at Holy Communion, he referred to it as a Passover meal. He called the bread and wine his body and blood. In several places, Jesus is called the Lamb of God (John 1: 29, 36; I Peter 1:19; Rev. 5:12). Remember, when the lamb is killed for Passover, the meal participants ingest the lamb. Consequently, St. Paul’s severe warnings about partaking in Holy Communion unworthily only make sense in light of Eucharistic realism (I Cor. 10:14-22; I Cor. 11:17-34). He writes: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? . . . Whoever, therefore eats and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.” (I Cor. 10:16; 11:27)
In light of all these passages and the fact that Jesus called himself the bread of life (John 6:41-51) and that he said that his followers must “eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood” (John 6:53), the Eucharistic realism of the Early Church, the Eastern Churches (both in and out of communion with Rome), and the pre-Reformation medieval Church (fifth to sixteenth centuries) seems almost unremarkable. So, what first appeared to be a stumbling block was transformed into a cornerstone.
Francis J. Beckwith is Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies at Baylor University. He tells the story of his journey from Catholicism to Protestantism and back again in his book, Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic. He blogs at Return to Rome.
Matthew 28 - “teaching them to observe all things I have commanded you”
2 Thessalonians - “stand firm and hold to the traditions you were taught”
Justin Martyr - “so also we have been taught”
Jesus commands the Church to teach, Paul teaches, Justin receives the teaching and passes along the teaching.....and so on........til the present day.
i have no problem stating Jesus is true God and true man, the second person of the Trinity.
cronos would have no problem stating that.
boatbums would have no problem stating that.
who would pass up the chance to proclaim Jesus is God? no Christian i know!
You did far more than just post Scripture passages. It is yours and your Church's interpretation of those verses that is in dispute. And there are ample grounds based upon many other Scripture passages to do so.
Do you know what YOPIOS is? It stands for, "Your Own Personal Interpretation of Scripture." Sort of what Luther meant when he wrote that every milkmaid would now be her own pope. Go for it!
Amen.
I Corinthians 15:14-19
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all others.
if the Catholic Church is the “counterfeit church”, please tell me where the “true” Church was from 95ad til 1517? you do believe the gates of hell would not prevail against it, right? if so, we should be able to find it throughout time, correct?
Augustine’s correct understanding of God’s predestination of all things?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAH
Read this:
Once upon a time, before anything was created, when God in three persons dwelt happily in and of themselves, God the Father said, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea. We’re going to create a universe by and through you, God the Son, and I am, before you create anything at all, going to determine how every single bit of it, from start to finish, from the beginning to the end, from the least quark to the biggest bang, is going to go.”
“We will create an entire human race from an original male and female whom I will cause to be tempted and sin and, because of that, subject the rest of the human race to untold millennia of misery and suffering and death, all for my greater glory because it seemed good to me, all the while promising them a means of salvation from that misery I’ve imposed on them as a result of their sin against me that I will have preordained.”
“And a really cool thing is that we will tell them that if they listen to what they are told and follow it faithfully, we will hear them and answer them and heal their land but they won’t know that in actuality they won’t be able even to try unless we make a few of them do it and the vast majority we will keep in the bondage of sin and degradation and then hold them responsible for not doing what we created them to be unable to do.”
“And the best thing of all, God the Son, is that because I will say that the sin that I will ordain and set into motion, to the very degree and extent that is my good pleasure according to the unfathomable counsel of my will, cannot be forgiven without a sacrifice and since no human will be able or capable or even willing to provide that sacrifice, because I will have made them unable, incapable, and unwilling, YOU are going to have lay aside your glory and the fellowship we enjoy to enter the human race and grow up among those who—but for the few I will have made to act to the contrary—won’t listen because I will have made them unable to hear, who won’t see because I will have blinded them to the truth, and who won’t ask for forgiveness for something they were hopeless to avoid doing because I will have made them incapable of doing so and then have the ever loving crap beaten out of you, scourged to within an inch of your life, before being made to carry the instrument of your torture and death before jeering crowds, because I will have made them do that, to the place where others, because of my decree before the foundations of the earth according to my own good counsel, will drive spikes through your wrists and hoist you up to hang between criminals—and the best part of all, at that moment you are about to die, I’ll turn my back on you!”
“But it will all be okay, right, because in three days, I’ll raise you from the dead so that we can say that this proves you are who we already know you are without ever the necessity of our creating a universe or even a human race to begin with and then declare faith in that as the ostensible means by which we confer saving grace on the humans but without telling them, until John Calvin comes along, that what they think is turning to us in faith to freely receive the gift of forgiveness and salvation is every bit as programmed and inevitable as the fate of the majority of the human race on their way to burn and suffer eternally in the lake of fire for refusing to believe that which I will have made them unable to believe since before I will have ever created anything at all, and this all for my praise and glory. How does that sound?”
And does God the Son say, “Wait a second, you’re going to create a universe with a world of conscious beings made in our image, screw them over in the most horrendous ways imaginable, hold them responsible for what you’re going to compel them to do, and then, near the end of the whole shebang, make ME suffer for every sin they ever committed without their ever having had the capacity to decide otherwise and die so that those who don’t even have the capacity to make anything but a faux choice will be “saved”? And that will make the relationship you and I and the Holy Spirit are sharing right now better how?” or does he say, “Hey, that sounds great and we’ll call it the GOOD NEWS!”
23 posted on Thursday, January 27, 2011 7:49:31 AM by aruanan Posted by Permission.
Calvin, dead and silent, still trying to lead Christians astray.
Oh, really?
There is the baptism of John. Acts 13:24 "When John had first preached before his coming the baptism of repentance to all the people of Israel."
There is the baptism of Jesus. Acts 19:4-5 "Then said Paul, John verily baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people, that they should believe on him which should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus. When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus."
Baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire. Matt. 3:11 "I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire"
There were also ritual baptisms in the Old Testament, the word "rachats" was used to mean wash, wash off, wash away, bathe and was used metaphorically to mean to wash the defilement of sin adhering to men. It was set as an ordinance forever for there to be a laver of bronze/brass to be put between the tabernacle and the altar for all the sons of Aaron (the priests) to wash before they made offerings to the Lord. Exodus 30:18-21 "18 “Make a bronze basin, with its bronze stand, for washing. Place it between the tent of meeting and the altar, and put water in it. 19 Aaron and his sons are to wash their hands and feet with water from it. 20 Whenever they enter the tent of meeting, they shall wash with water so that they will not die. Also, when they approach the altar to minister by presenting a food offering to the LORD, 21 they shall wash their hands and feet so that they will not die. This is to be a lasting ordinance for Aaron and his descendants for the generations to come.”
Offerings of animals were also ritually baptized (washed) before being offered. So, I hope you see that thinking baptize always and only means the water baptism "sacrament" is not correct.
Agreed.
Even the quizzical Opus pic I post is a favorite of mine.
I don’t need your help on anything.
I’ve seen what you’ve posted on different topics and how unScriptural it is. I don’t trust Catholicism or Catholics to give me the truth about anything any more.
I prefer to get my spiritual teaching from a more reliable source. Like the Bible.
With the preaching from the Scriptures, prayers, offerings, greetings and communion service it certainly sounds exactly like "Protestant" services today. So the claim that only the Roman Catholic Church is the one, only, true, church based on this detail is flimsy. Were you up-to-date in your reading or just making the usual snappy comments?
Emphasis mine.....
And? Of course we must be baptized to be saved. Just not the baptism you seem to be hung up on. There is the baptism of the Holy Spirit (born of the Spirit) that occurs when a person puts their trust in Jesus Christ as their Savior. That is when they become born again. The act of water baptism after they make this decision is in obedience to Christ to make an outward confession of faith to others and to indicate a commitment to walking in newness of life - just like it was done in the very beginning. Pigeonholing is not a smart practice and shows a lack of thinking about what we say before we say it and also to not just spout off what someone else says without being able to defend it yourself.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you really DON’T need to respond to every post in this thread. Maybe they didn’t explain that to you when they gave you the night shift responsibility.
Opus is one of my favorites!
May our Lord return soon!
The way they tell it to us (in the Episcopal seminary, that is), there was an intellectual explosion around the 1200’s. We mostly don’t appreciate that the Muslims weren’t “over there”, but rather, just down the road a piece.
(I cannot recommend the Penguin Atlas of the middle ages- or whatever they call it— enough. It’s really inexpensive, like $20, and it shows how chaotic things were all around the Mediterranean and through Europe.)
So there was great intellectual ferment shared by the “Abrahamic religions” because all three were strongly represented in what we now call Spain. And the Muslims had all the good Greek stuff.
(I am kind of on fire today because this is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, and a bunch of my lay Dominican friends made life vows today. My life vows, God willing, are next year. Anyway it was a great service with TWO totally awesome sermons, and I’m fired up!)
So this explosion of thought SEEMS to have happened because of texts the Muslims shared with us.(And it’s interesting and sad to report that the best Muslim thinkers and scholars were generally condemned by Islam as a whole.) So IF the Vatican had the texts and were sitting on them we have to come up with a plausible reason why. And it sure didn’t work!
And, for us, though Aquinas was not without his opponents while he lived and, after he died, Albert the Great came to defend his thought at an inquisition, he is the “Angelic Doctor” (doctor = teacher) because of the clarity and comprehensiveness of his thought and the depth of his piety as shown by his hymns.
Yes, I do know what YOPIOS stands for and, ironically, it is not just the dreaded "Protestants" that exercise it. That supposed quote of Luther's about the milkmaid, well I would love to see where you got it from. My research has led to several references to milkmaids and plowboys that Luther spoke of and each time it was positively as it had to do with how each person has the right to read and hear Gods word for themselves and how some, through being open and teachable by the leading and indwelling of the Holy Spirit when they came to faith in Jesus Christ, could actually do a better job at it than the so-called expert theologians of the Catholic Church.
I also found this interesting quote from beggarsallreformation:
In regards to “sects”- Luther said of the Roman Catholic Church: “…there is no other place in the world where there are so many sects, schisms, and errors as in the papal church. For the papacy, because it builds the church upon a city and person, has become the head and fountain of all sects which have followed it and have characterized Christian life in terms of eating and drinking, clothes and shoes, tonsures and hair, city and place, day and hour. For the spirituality and holiness of the papal church lives by such things, as was said above. This order fasts at this time, another order fasts at another time; this one does not eat meat, the other one does not eat eggs; this one wears black, the other one white; this one is Carthusian, the other Benedictine; and so they continue to create innumerable sects and habits, while faith and true Christian life go to pieces. All this is the result of the blindness which desires to see rather than believe the Christian church and to seek devout Christian life not in faith but in works, of which St. Paul writes so much in Colossians [2]. These things have invaded the church and blindness has confirmed the government of the pope.”
Martin Luther believed in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. He became indignant when groups, who had followed him out of the Catholic Church, rejected the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. He deplored the fact that every milkmaid and farmhand thought they could interpret scripture correctly. Here he is in his own words.
Who, but the devil, has granted such license of wresting the words of the holy Scripture? Who ever read in the Scriptures, that my body is the same as the sign of my body? or, that is is the same as it signifies? What language in the world ever spoke so? It is only then the devil, that imposes upon us by these fanatical men. Not one of the Fathers of the Church, though so numerous, ever spoke as the Sacramentarians: not one of them ever said, It is only bread and wine; or, the body and blood of Christ is not there present.
Surely, it is not credible, nor possible, since they often speak, and repeat their sentiments, that they should never (if they thought so) not so much as once, say, or let slip these words: It is bread only; or the body of Christ is not there, especially it being of great importance, that men should not be deceived. Certainly, in so many Fathers, and in so many writings, the negative might at least be found in one of them, had they thought the body and blood of Christ were not really present: but they are all of them unanimous.”
–Luther’s Collected Works, Wittenburg Edition, no. 7 p, 391
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