Posted on 03/31/2015 2:42:14 PM PDT by RnMomof7
If priests indeed have the exclusive power to change finite bread and wine into the body and blood of the infinite Christ, and, if indeed, consuming His body and blood is necessary for salvation, then the whole world must become Catholic to escape the wrath of God. On the other hand, if Jesus was speaking in figurative language, then this teaching becomes the most blasphemous and deceptive hoax any religion could impose on its people. There is no middle ground. (Eat My Flesh and Drink My Blood. by Mike Gendron)
“There is no indication in the biblical accounts of the Last Supper that the disciples thought that the bread and wine changed into the actual body and blood of Christ. There simply isn't any indication of this. Should we say that the disciples who were sitting right there with Jesus, actually thought that what Jesus was holding in his hands was his own body and blood? That would be ridiculous...
...The Mass is supposed to be a re-sacrifice of Christ. Therefore, the body and blood represented in the Mass become the broken body and shed blood of Christ. In other words, they represent the crucifixion ordeal. But how can this be since Jesus instituted the Supper before He was crucified? Are we to conclude that at the Last Supper, when they were all at the table, that when Jesus broke the bread it became His actual sacrificial body -- even though the sacrifice had not yet happened? Likewise are we to conclude that when Jesus gave the wine that it became His actual sacrificial blood -- even though the sacrifice had not yet happened? That would make no sense at all”. (Matthew Slick Transubstantiation and the Real Presence.
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Is John 6:66 Evidence of Transubstantiation?
Jason Engwer
"Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall not hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst....It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life." - John 6:35, 6:63
Catholics often claim that John 6 is a passage about the eucharist, and that Jesus was teaching transubstantiation by telling people to "eat His flesh and drink His blood". Typical is the April 22, 1998 edition of Mother Angelica Live, a television program on the Roman Catholic network EWTN. The guests on the program, Bob and Penny Lord, argued that Jesus wouldn't have let people leave Him, as some did in John 6:66, if His statements about "eating My flesh and drinking My blood" were not to be taken as actual eating and drinking of flesh and blood. Supposedly, Jesus allowing those people to leave Him is evidence that He was teaching transubstantiation, and that He was unwilling to compromise that teaching in order to have more followers. Surely He would have explained to the people in John 6:66 what He really meant if He wasn't referring to actual eating and drinking of flesh and blood, right?
Actually, there are some problems with the Roman Catholic interpretation of John 6. In verse 35, Jesus identifies what the "eating and drinking" are. They represent coming to Him and believing in Him. Trusting in Christ, not participation in Roman Catholic mass, eliminates a person's hunger and thirst. Throughout John 6, statements about faith in Christ are interspersed with the statements about "eating and drinking" (verses 29, 35, 36, 40, 47, 64). As Jesus often did, He was using an analogy to illustrate a point. In this case, He was illustrating a true faith, a faith that involves a person coming to Christ, believing in Him, and then never hungering or thirsting again as a result. This is why Jesus told people that He is the bread of life, and that they are responsible for eating His flesh and drinking His blood. He said these things before the Last Supper. People were just as responsible for eating His flesh and drinking His blood before the eucharist was instituted as they were after.
Not only does the Catholic interpretation of John 6 miss the theme of the passage, but it also rests on some bad assumptions. Did Jesus really let the people in John 6:66 leave Him without a clarification of what He meant? No, He didn't. In verses 35 and 63, Jesus reveals that He isn't referring to actual eating and drinking of flesh and blood. If some who heard Him missed or forgot what He was saying in those verses, that was a problem with them, not with Jesus.
And was it even the concept of actual eating and drinking that motivated the people in John 6:66 to leave Jesus? Possibly not. The immediate context of their departure is Christ's teaching about His own foreknowledge and predestination (John 6:64-65). Catholic apologists often overlook the verses immediately before verse 66, and go back to what Jesus was saying earlier in the passage. Why should we do that? We really don't know all of what was motivating the people in John 6:66. For all we know, they may have left because what Jesus said in verses 64-65 convicted them that they didn't truly believe in Him.
It's also possible, of course, that they did think Jesus was referring to actual eating and drinking of flesh and blood. Does it follow, then, that Jesus would have tried to keep those people from leaving Him if He really wasn't referring to actual eating and drinking? No, it doesn't. He knew that these people had never really believed in Him (John 6:64). And contrary to what Catholic apologists suggest, Jesus didn't always clarify His teachings to those who rejected Him. In Matthew 13:10-17, Jesus explains that He purposely kept some people from understanding what He was teaching. In John 2:19-22, Jesus refers to His body as a "temple", which many people misunderstood as a reference to the actual temple in Jerusalem. He didn't explain to these people what He really meant. We read in Mark 14:56-59 that some people, long after Jesus had made the statement in John 2:19, were still thinking that He had referred to the actual temple in Jerusalem. And in John 21:22-23, we read of another instance of Jesus saying something that was misunderstood by some people, with the misunderstanding leading to the false conclusion that the apostle John wouldn't die. Yet, Jesus didn't clarify the statement. It was John who clarified it decades later in his gospel. (Any suggestion that John didn't clarify chapter 6 in his gospel only begs the question. How do Catholics know that passages such as John 6:35 and 6:63 aren't clarifications of what Jesus meant?) When Catholic apologists claim that it would be unprecedented for Jesus not to further clarify His message to the people in John 6:66, if He wasn't referring to actual eating and drinking, they're mistaken. He could have been following the same pattern we see in Matthew 13:10-17, John 2:19-22, and John 21:22-23. To this day, people continue to disagree about what Jesus meant by some of the parables in Matthew's gospel, for example.
Catholic apologists sometimes argue that the metaphorical concept of eating somebody's flesh and drinking his blood always had a negative connotation among the Jews. They point to passages of scripture like Psalms 27:2 and Revelation 16:6. Therefore, if Jesus was using such terminology in a metaphorical way, He would have been telling His listeners to do something negative. Since Jesus wouldn't have done that, He must not have been speaking metaphorically. The problem with this Catholic argument is that it's erroneous in its first claim. While metaphorically eating flesh and drinking blood did sometimes have a negative connotation, it also sometimes had a positive connotation (http://www.christian-thinktank.com/hnoblood2.html#john6). And since Jesus gave us a positive definition in John 6:35, there's no need to look for any other definition.
We're told by Jesus and the apostle Paul that the bread and wine of the eucharist remain bread and wine even after consecration (Matthew 26:29, 1 Corinthians 11:26-27). The Roman Catholic view of communion is filled with errors, some of them undermining fundamental doctrines of scripture. Citing John 6, or citing John 6:66 in particular, doesn't change that.
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My wife is Catholic and she sees communion the same way I do. I am Presbyterian. It is symbolic.
Pretty strange to use THAT PARTICULAR NUMBERED PASSAGE, isn’t it???
“Consider how contrary to the mind of God are the heterodox in regard to the grace of God which has come to us. They have no regard for charity, none for the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, none for the man in prison, the hungry or the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, the flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His graciousness, raised from the dead.”
“Letter to the Smyrnaeans”, paragraph 6. circa 80-110 A
funny, Ignatius of Antioch quoted above learned the faith from the human author of John 6, the Apostle John.
I will leave it to the reader to decide if Ignatius believed the Eucharist to be the Body of Christ.
those following the 16th century tradition of men are merely recycling the unbelief of the Gnostics.
Saul/Paul was quite a man. Luke in Acts writes about Saul and his being blinded for 3-4 days from a vision and Paul went on to do wonderful things after accepting Jesus. Paul wrote many books in the New Testament.
Regarding Paul, its inspiring how the Lord turned around a Pharisee of Pharisees.
I think someone who learned the faith from the Apostle John would know if the Eucharist is the Body of Christ as Jesus declared and Christians have always believed or is it symbolic as was first taught in the 16th century.
please read post #23 to see what that man taught by John had to say on the subject.
he wrote this before he was put to death in Rome for his faith.
Why do they base their faith on being actively anti-Catholic? Why not just list your own beliefs and ignore Catholics?
Chapter numbers were added by Stephen Langton, who would later become the Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury in 1211 A.D.
The Chapter and verse numbers are not in the original documents, just like Sola Scriptura.
Yes, chapter and verse numbers are a tradition of men.
I would suggest finding a Bible that doesn't use them, if you don't want to follow a human tradition.
1 Corinthians 11:27-29
whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning THE BODY AND BLOOD OF THE LORD. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. for any one who eats and drinks without DISCERNING THE BODY eats and drinks judgment upon himself.
the words speak for themselves and have been understood for 2,000 years now.
I'm not Catholic, but I suppose that other forms of argumentation may be more convincing than what people call "attacks." Since Matthew 23 keeps getting quoted on the Religion Forum, seemingly as evidence of divine permission to call people "fools" more often than we probably should, I've noticed in verse 15 that even the Pharisees made a convert once in a while. Now, numbers of converts are no proof of truth, but what fruit is there from certain styles of posting?
for those who don’t understand what the word “discerning” means in 1 Corinthians 11. it means recognize.
Msgr. Ronald Knox did a translation that has the verse numbers in the margins. Reading the Bible without those artificial pauses changed the way I read and understood Sacred Scripture.
Then, having taken the bread and given it to His disciples, He made it His own body, by saying, "This is my body," that is, the figure of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been, unless there were first a veritable body (Against Marcion, Bk 4).Ignatius is saying the same thing. It is a quite typical mode of expression under the platonic mode of relating type to archetype. There is a relationship, and it can be expressed very directly, "A is B," and still have the sense of what we moderns would think of as a symbolic reference.
quoted from an article here: http://www.justforcatholics.org/a181.htm
These are not the droids you're looking for?
St. Ignatius, St. Justin Martyr, and St. Irenaeus are then cited extensively for this literal view of the Eucharist as the body and blood of Christ. Stone continues concerning Tertullian’s view of the Eucharist and Sacraments —
“A very imperfect idea of the Eucharistic doctrine of Tertullian would be given if attention were confined to those passages in his writings in which he describes the Eucharist as the ‘figura’ of the body of Christ and the means by which our Lord ‘makes His body present.’ To understand it rightly, it must be viewed in the general setting of sacramental principle which Tertullian emphasizes. In his eyes the Incarnation has introduced new aspects of the relation of man to God. The human flesh which the Lord then took is an abiding reality. ‘That same Person who suffered,’ he declares, ‘will come from heaven; that same Person who was raised from the dead will appear to all. And they who pierced Him will see and recognize the very flesh against which they raged’ [De carn Christi, 24]. With this Christ, thus retaining His human body and blood, Christians are closely united. The baptised are clothed with Christ; in them Christ lives [De fug 10; De poen 10]. By the daily reception of the bread of life there is continuance in Christ and abiding union in His body [De orat 6]. Before the Incarnation the flesh was far off from God, ‘not yet worthy of the gift of salvation, not yet fitted for the duty of holiness’; but Christ’s work, accomplished in the flesh, has changed all that [De pud 6]. Since the Incarnation Sacraments have become necessary and effectual [De Bapt 11,13]; and that which in the ordinances of the Church touches the flesh benefits the soul [De carn res 8].
“It is in harmony with these general sacramental principles that Tertullian not only calls the Eucharist ‘the holy thing’ [De spectac 25], but also often and naturally refers to it as the body of Christ.” (Stone, vol 1, pg 36-37)
Stone then gives six clear examples of Tertullian’s literal view —
(1) It is a matter of anxious care that no drop of the wine or fragment of the bread should fall to the ground (De cor 3).
(2) It was the Lord’s body which the disciples received at the Last Supper (Adv Marc iv,40).
(3) It is the Lord’s body which the communicant receives in the Church or reserves for his Communion at home (De orat 19).
(4) It is the Lord’s body with the richness of which the Christian is fed in the Eucharist (De pud 9).
(5) It is Christ’s body and blood with which “the flesh is clothed, so that the soul also may be made fat by God” (De carn res 8).
(6) Even in unworthy Communions it is the body of the Lord which wicked hands approach, the body of the Lord which wicked men outrage and offend
for a more complete view of Tertullian and the Eucharist.
Zwingli and old school Baptists did not believe anything like this.
“It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh profits nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” - John 6:63
If you want to know the truth, you have to go to the source
This is My Body
Jesus Christ, 33ad
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