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To: imardmd1
... as giving the bread is representative of partaking of Him spiritually -- a figure of speech.

To me, that is assuming the thing to be proved. It's not incoherent in itself, but it's not so much a refutation as a presenting of another view for consideration.

There are layers and layers here, and I don't think it can be determined by argument alone.

Let me offer something from my side, not as an argument but as something suggestive:

When my wife and I had a child, naturally I meditated on many things,among which was the fatherhood of God. And I saw that, the mind and language being what they must be, to say that God is Father is in a way metaphorical.

Then, another time, I was thinking about Unity and Trinity. I concluded that when we, so to speak, "meet" the One, unity doesn't turn out to be what we thought, but rather, THE unity comes in three hypostases.

And in fact, at the sensory level, while we loosely speak of "one thing," in fact, one egg or one stone is a multitude, a manyness of particles and materials and whatnot. So TRUE oneness, I thought,is encountered in God alone.

And then I thought back to fatherhood. And I saw that I am not utterly father. I am son, brother, spouse, and father. And it is scarcely that I myself am father -- except for the accident of my being more or less in charge of one set of genitals.

You see where I'm going? We start with concrete referents in the created world and, the more we look at them, the more we see that they are not very much, certainly not entirely or exactly, what we call them. And it turns out that GOD is the TRUE Father while I am a kind of metaphor.

Naturally, this turns my thinking about John 6 upside down and shakes it.

What ARE bread and wine? Are they anything really? DO they, possibly, come into themselves when they are consecrated? For all of us, Water doesn't make dirt disappear. It attenuates it, spread it around. For those of us who believe in Baptismal regeneration, maybe it alone is the true washing, that REALLY removes REAL spots and stains.

52 posted on 08/05/2013 1:14:58 PM PDT by Mad Dawg (In te, Domine, speravi: non confundar in aeternum.)
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To: Mad Dawg

“And it turns out that GOD is the TRUE Father while I am a kind of metaphor.”

Yeah.


59 posted on 08/05/2013 1:33:39 PM PDT by sitetest (If Roe is not overturned, no unborn child will ever be protected in law.)
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To: Mad Dawg
You see where I'm going?

No, I do not see where you are going. When you stray from a literal, grammatical, syntactical, historical, cultural hermeneutic, you just open a gateway that the Holy Scripture does not use except when it explains itself clearly and succinctly. This method takes you where the Scripture does not, and calls on allegorical inventions to play the game of trying to convince others of some portion of Scripture The God has not given to you to understand.

By forcing a non-literal interpretation on the masses, a body of customs is born that needs more and more props, until one has a religion that stands more on reasonings, claimed experiences, and "traditions" of fallible men, not on special revelation through Scripture.

By doing so, God's communication to mankind is lost and one has only the "gospel" of a false Christ. IMHO

134 posted on 08/06/2013 5:46:51 AM PDT by imardmd1 (Fiat Lux)
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