Birth has nothing to do with it. We become Christians when God makes us Christians. That, ordinarily is baptism. The soul and its volition has nothing to do with the soul getting the mark of the Holy Spirit. There is no direct scripture on infant baptism, because all interesting and instructive conversions are of adults. Indirectly, we read on a number of occasions that people were baptized "and their house", or maybe "household" ("οικος"). That is likely to include children. Christ asked the children to be brought to Him; why wouldn't He want them to brought to Him in the most meaningful sense of the word?
On this "private judgment" issue I have a feeling you have a question that I am not getting, or maybe there is something in it that is important to you that I never felt important. Like anything else I do there is grace of God in it and also my own private reason cooperating with grace. That is about all.
Obviously?
Just obvious: one allegory (door) is followed by another (vine), no sacrament is established based on doors, no insistence on the meaning of "door" being literate and no misunderstanding. The face value of allegory is allegory; no one is denying that they are plentiful. The point remains that John 6 is not framed as allegory, is in context of the feeding of thousands and the manna from heaven, and the impending sacrifice of Christ to give us life, -- neither three are allegorical. It is in the context of real physical events.
Jesus really meant what he said when he said "the flesh profits nothing; my words are spirit, and they are life."
Correct, neither this is allegorical speech, but it does not negate the physical character of the Eucharist. It furthers the explanation by noting that the effect of the Eucharist (the "profit" from it) is purely spiritual. It does not say that the Eucharist itself is purely spiritual. Christ did not change His mind from one verse to the next.
There is nothing about transubstantiation that has anything to do with the face value of Scripture
Correct again, the face value is simply "this is my body, eat it, and do it". How the bread becomes a body is not explained, nor should it be explained. The word of Christ, spoken solemnly at the Last Supper and the discussion in the future tense in John 6 with strikingly insisting, black-and-white tone should be enough whether we can explain it through some scholastic trick or not.
neither in Tertullian nor Ignatius are we locked into the special meaning of “is”
Sure we are, in the plain old meaning of "is" being "is". The Eucharist is Christ's body; who does not believe that Christians should stay away from. Note that he did not say "whoever thinks Christ is a spirit" are heretics, but "whoever does not believe the Eucharist is the body of Christ is a heretic". The Docetist context changes nothing.
The Protestant hermeneutic, on the other hand, does not allow extraordinary meanings to words that work just as well with ordinary meanings.
Well, that is unfortunate because there was nothing ordinary about virgin birth, death and resurrection of Christ, nor, to that matter, "manna" falling from the sky and five loaves feeding thousands. Of course the word "is" can be used to build an allegory as well as build a direct message; but the fact that Jesus speaks contrary to people's intuition, insists on what seems to them an absurdity being truth; and that the accounts at the Last Supper and in 1 Cor. 11 support the literal meaning but not an allegorical meaning, -- all that shows that the approach to avoid extraordinary meaning when talking of extraordinary things is not only stupid philosophically but also fails the plain text in front of you.
If you find that theory [transubstantiation] credible or satisfactory
Not particularly; on that I am with the Orthodox, I don't think a miracle of the Real Presence can or needs to be explained. The Eucharist is Christ's body not because Aquinas cleverly consulted Aristotle, but because Jesus said so.
He clearly separates the thing the sign is about from the sign itself
Good, if you deal with a sign. We don't, in this case: Christ did not say "this is a sign of my body; eat the sign", He said "this is my body for you to eat".
Baptized people do not physically die and then rise from the dead in the baptismal waters
That would be because Christ did not die and rise in baptism and did not ask us to do baptism in order to bring us to the Sacrifice of the Cross. The teaching on the Eucharist has no analogy in other sacraments of the Church
Peace,
SR
We become Christians when God makes us Christians.
Are you a Calvinist then? But no, because here you say:
Like anything else I do there is grace of God in it and also my own private reason cooperating with grace
In which I see the word "cooperating" as an admission of volition. When someone believes, and is baptized, as is the model for all individual NT conversions, said belief is a volitional act, a turning of the mind from the depredations of sin (repentance) to focus on the Savior for His power to save (faith):
Rom 10:9-11 That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.
Baptismal regeneration, I do understand, is the issue here for you, and it confuses the issue I've been raising of private judgment. The thing I am getting at, which has been raised numerous times in the past by other RC apologists, is that no one (except perhaps your special case of someone being presumptively RC from infancy) can avoid the use of private judgment in becoming RC, so why is private judgment condemned? True, it is fallible, but everyone must use it, and you admit that you do. Yet supposedly it is only really bad when Protestants use it, for example, to try to understand Scripture. Double standard fallacy.
As to allegories (Jesus is the Door etc):
Just obvious
According to whose rules for “obvious?” My previous quote to you of Augustine was his attempt to search out some of those rules, but there is no formal set. It remains to the judgment of the interpreter, and as I have already pointed out, a number of the fathers agree with Protestants that the linguistic signaling in John 6 suggests a spiritual and not a corporeal understanding of consuming Christ’s flesh and blood, which is confirmed by Jesus himself in verse 63, as we have already discussed.
But this last point is perhaps easier to understand in light of the immediately preceding passage:
John 6:61-62 When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this, He said to them, "Does this offend you? What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before? (NKJV)
Here Jesus has made a statement that seems impossible, especially under Jewish law rejecting cannibalism, and it has them confused and complaining. Then Jesus ratchets up the “impossibility factor” by telling them, in essence, if you think it’s hard to accept now, just how much harder will it be when Jesus is removed to Heaven?
It is at precisely this moment when he explains to them that their carnal understanding, their thinking of this in terms of his literal flesh, is the key to their misunderstanding, that instead they should be seeing this in spiritual terms, not carnal.
BTW, there is no reference here to your proposed hybrid meaning of spiritually nutritious consumption of corporeal flesh. That is an anachronistic insertion into the text of ideas developed much later which are alien to the "face value" meaning of verse 63, which is, as Jesus says, that it is His words that are to be spiritually understood, that produce a spiritual benefit, as opposite from the unprofitable view of seeing his body and blood as physical foods.
Put another way, the crowds were hungry; they craved that physical food, they clamored for more of that physical food from Jesus. That was their frame of reference. Jesus tells them flat out that frame of reference is wrong, that they should be looking for the spiritual reality bound up in His words.
By analogy, consider Jesus' interaction with the Samaritan woman. When Jesus confronts her with her personal sins and spiritually needy condition, she immediately deflects from that to the popular debate about where, physically, to worship. Jesus condescends to answer the physical question, but then redirects her to think of worship not in physical terms, but rather that those who worship God must do so in spirit and in truth. In other words, she needed to tend to her heart and her sins, not which building she worshipped in.
As well in other places. The point is, Jesus made a habit of redirecting his hearers to rise above their carnal misunderstanding of spiritual truth. This passage is just a part of that larger pattern, and fits in well with the Johannine presentation of Jesus as the Logos.
It is in the context of real physical events.
To a limited extent, yes, but as pointed out above, always with a view to redirecting his listeners to matters of the sprit, the cleansing of the heart, the warm reception of the words of Christ, the life and death of Christ, as the true nutrition of the soul.
Furthermore, unlike most literature, we have the formal declaration of a presumption in favor of analogical language:
Mark 4:34 But without a parable He did not speak to them. And when they were alone, He explained all things to His disciples.
And lest one be tempted to think this was a one-time event, the parallel passage makes it even clearer that it was a sustained pattern with a divine purpose:
Matthew 13:34-35 All these things Jesus spoke to the multitude in parables; and without a parable He did not speak to them, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying: "I WILL OPEN MY MOUTH IN PARABLES; I WILL UTTER THINGS KEPT SECRET FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD."
And again, after teaching the larger group using analogy, he always offers his close disciples an explanation, an intimate look at the spiritual realities lying behind the figures of speech his carnal audience so often found confusing. But what is the divine purpose? Why set up the carnally-minded for failure?
Mark 4:11-12 And He said to them, "To you it has been given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but to those who are outside, all things come in parables, so that 'SEEING THEY MAY SEE AND NOT PERCEIVE, AND HEARING THEY MAY HEAR AND NOT UNDERSTAND; LEST THEY SHOULD TURN, AND THEIR SINS BE FORGIVEN THEM.' "
God had determined judgment, and judgment would fall. They would not be given the opportunity to escape. This too is a hard saying, but God is sovereign, and His judgment is not to be questioned. Or, as I like to think of it, God is perfectly good, and we are not. If we were perfectly good, and understood everything as well as God understands it, we would never disagree with any of His acts. Ever.
In any event, this means that the burden of proof is on any interpreter whose interpretation contradicts this presumption of analogy. Put another way, if any opportunity is presented to take a difficult saying and render it as an analogy (or more precisely as a parable), then that analogy is the presumptively correct interpretation. We have Jesus and the prophets to back that up, not the Johnny-come-lately crowd of the 8th, 13th, or 15th centuries.
In fact, so obvious is this mode of interpretation that Augustine himself could not escape it. You rightly point out he is not infallible. But then no one but God is fully without error at all times and in all ways. This means that your citation of Ignatius has the same limitation. His words, made to stand alone and out of context, might be understood in a literal sense. But just as well he could be using the verb of being figuratively, just as happens with so many of the analogies of Scripture. It was a pattern of speech typical for the day, and does not unequivocally demonstrate his belief in real presence in the RC/Aquinian sense, but even if it did, could not be regarded as greater authority than any other fallible father.
So on the one hand, I do recognize Augustine as fallible, and I am not presenting him here as proof on a par with Scripture of the memorialist view of the Eucharist. But on the other hand, if he is allowed statements such as follows, and yet remains a doctor of the Church in good standing, how do modern RCs justify condemnation of those who agree with him in every respect on this matter?. For example, he says:
If the sentence is one of command, either forbidding a crime or vice, or enjoining an act of prudence or benevolence, it is not figurative. If, however, it seems to enjoin a crime or vice, or to forbid an act of prudence or benevolence, it is figurative. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man,” says Christ, “and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” John 6:53 This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should have a share [communicandem] in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory [in memoria] of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us.Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book III, Chapter 16.
See http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/12023.htm for full context.
Now before, you said:
Good, if you deal with a sign. We don't, in this case
Yet here we have Augustine practically writing Zwingli’s confession for him! Augustine clearly here says it is a sign.
Now to reiterate, you miss my point if you think I am raising Augustine as proof per se for a figurative approach to John 6:53. I am not. He is, as you say, quite fallible, as are we all. But last I checked, he is still regarded as a highly commended doctor of the church in good standing, and it is not death to listen to his teachings, even here. Whereas in Ignatius’ case, listening to the Gnostics deny the fleshly coming of the Christ would indeed be death.
And so the two are harmonized with each other AND with Scripture IF one allows that the presumption of figurative language, as set in place by God Himself and prophesied through the Holy Spirit, is in effect for John 6. Which presumption by no coincidence at all squares nicely with the rules of ordinary language to confirm the figurative usage, both implicitly in the impossibility of cannibalism, and explicitly in the flat denial of the profitability of the flesh in understanding these words of Christ.
But this is odd, because Trent anathematizes anything short of transubstantiation, even some generic form of real presence. They specifically sign off on Aquinas’ pseudo-Aristotelian accidence versus substance:
"If anyone says that in the sacred and holy sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and denies that wonderful and singular change of the whole substance of the bread into the body and the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the appearances only of bread and wine remaining, which change the Catholic Church most aptly calls transubstantiation, let him be anathema." (Council of Trent, Second Canon, 13th Session).
So how either Augustine as a virtual Zwinglian or you as one not committed to transubstantiation per se can avoid anathematization is not clear to me. Has something changed since Trent? But if Augustine is accepted, and his words here simply put off as mere fallibility, why are Protestants not accorded the same grace, even though we adopt an essentially Augustinian position in this matter?
One last footnote, then I have to get to bed. You somewhere chided me for limiting myself to the historical grammatical hermeneutic that is so typical of Protestantism, i.e., the natural use of natural language, because you thought it would prevent me seeing all the many supernatural doctrines of Scripture. But that is a serious misunderstanding of the hermeneutic. There is no rejection of divine truth. But there is an operating assumption that God speaks to us of His divine treasures using words that in themselves are ordinary and mundane. They only acquire their divine meaning when they convey the divine message in ordinary language. They do not become infused with magic meanings which we by some lost art of gnosis must ferret out.
For example, if I say “Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead,” I need no special meanings for any of those words. They all have their mundane meanings, but taken together convey a totally earthshattering divine truth, that Jesus has the power to raise the dead, and so death is not final, that regaining life after death depends on one’s relationship with Jesus.
So this hermeneutic does not prevent us from seeing any of the divine truths of Scripture. What it does do is act as an insurance policy that we will not go the way of the gnostics or other offshoots by inventing elaborate networks of hidden meanings which only our “enlighted” group has the power to interpret correctly. God knows perfectly well how to communicate with us, and he has done so in such a way that it is hidden from the self-wise but fully accessible to those with the faith of a child:
Luke 10:21-22 In that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes: even so, Father; for so it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him.
Amen.
Peace,
SR