ping
Hoss
The scripture is pretty simple. It’s a symbol. It is a SIMPLE symbol that represents the foundational teaching upon which Christianity exists.
It shocks some Catholics when I mention that my wife and I sometimes take communion after a meal at home.
“As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of Me...”
Best reason? Christ said “in remembrance of me”, not “this bread and wine will turn into meat and blood”.
In before the catholics.
If it is a symbol then why John 6:66? Previously when Jesus spoke figuratively he would follow up with a clarification, but then here he doubles down and many of his disciples leave because the teaching was too hard.
“Gospel of John doesn’t mention the Eucharist.”
Except for almost the entire chapter 6 of John.
Absolutely everybody in attendance at the Council of Chalcedon believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. (Discussed here)
You only need one reason. It isn’t in the Bible. It’s a local church ordinance to remember Him until He comes again.
“the cup”
Well, now, in before the “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” cup shows up.
Most people treat everything in life including religion as a superstition; religion, EMP, politics, etc.
He commands us to eat His Body and Blood. His words are unmistakeable.
I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.
For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.
Christ literally gives Himself to us as real food and real drink. There's nothing to misinterpret here. There's no room for manoeuvre.
Moreover: when we consider the language used in the Gospel of John, the literal interpretation becomes undeniable.
In John 6:50-53 Christ's words are translated using various forms of the Greek verb phago, 'eating.' As in 'Sarcophagus'.
However after the Jews begin to express incredulity at the idea of eating Christ’s flesh, His language intensified.
In verse 54, John begins to use trogo instead of phago. Trogo is a decidedly more graphic term, meaning 'to chew on' or to 'gnaw on'—as when an animal is ripping apart its prey. The text is closer to:
Whoever gnaws on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.
If anything more needed to be said: St Paul is also abundantly clear
Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.
All this: not to mention Christ's institution of what we now call the Eucharist at the Last Supper.
From Luke:
And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood."
If any corroborating evidence were needed, St Paul speaks about the Eucharist in Corinthians.
And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
I quote these to show that Christ's Body and Blood were eaten and drunk in the very early Church.
Do not separate yourself from the Body and Blood of Christ! He commands you to eat of Him, or 'you will not have life within you'.
I knew the minute he referred to the anathema that we were in for a ride. What has the anathema to do with the dogma itself?
It is clear from our calling one of those crucified with Jesus “SAINT” Dismas that we do NOT hold that right belief or right reception of the Blessed Sacrament is absolutely necessary for salvation. So before he gets to the dogma he has already said a thing (1) that is not true, and (2) that supports the common and, to my mind, false because over-simplified accusation that the Catholic Church believes in salvation by works. Again, St. Dismas suffices to show that that is not so.
So, at the very kindest, we must conclude that he is not careful or precise and that his statements about Catholic teaching are unreliable.
Even his characterization of Zwingli is similarly simplistic. Zwingli did not say the Eucharist was something the worshippers did, a memorial and a proclamation only. There was a line of thought, hinted at in Cranmer and developed by Hooker that is sometimes glibly called “Real Presence in the Believer,” and sometimes, more seriously, “Virtualism.”
When I read Cranmer on the Eucharist, 40 years ago, I came away with the sense that philosophy had not kept up (and maybe shouldn't have tried) with the thinking of the Reformers. At the time I tended to the Cranmer/Hooker account, if that matters. I was not looking for arguments against it, but for support.
Now, to me, the best and most interesting part of his paper is the argument from the Chalcedonian Definition of the Hypostatic Union.
I would criticize it 3 ways.
1) He stresses the division of natures at the expense of the union in one person. It's easy to stumble on the right dogma of WHAT IHS XP was. I'm certainly never completely confident!
But, as the definition says, you must NEITHER confuse the divine and human nature or substance NOR divide the one person. And once you have someone who appears in upper rooms, the doors being locked for fear of the Jews, some questions about the “locus” of the Risen Lord remain unresolvably mysterious.
(2) But again, as he divides the person, he also shows a one-sided understanding of time and space. In particular, in his consideration of the Last Supper he gives more importance to the sequence of events than I think correct.
Yes, Aquinas suggests that the “body” of the Last Supper was not the Risen Body. So time and sequence matter somewhat. But I propose that every act of God's has always been salvific, FROM the creation of light, the separation of dry-land and water, the provision of food, THROUGH the events of the most holy three days since time began, to the, somewhere, person who accepts Christ as I type or you read this.
The salvific act of causing plants to grow and that of casting the stars from heaven, and everything in between, is, so to speak, powered by the Triduum Sacrum. The effects of the Cross are not bound by the flow of time. God is Melech haOlam, the king of time, not its subject. And his mercies endure forever, for ALL ages. And he was merciful when there was not yet light. And will be merciful when the sun no longer shines.
(3) Protestant thought seems to me to suffer from a very unscriptural and unreasonable understanding of basic matters, like the Biblical relationship between soul and body. If the proper state of the human is the union of soul and body, and if Resurrection is the proper or intended state, then Jesus, united with Divinity, brings a body to that union.
Now, unless God is diminished by the Resurrection — an absurd thought — then he is still omnipresent. And if Jesus is true God he is also omnipresent. So the resurrected body is omnipresent. So being present, sacramentally (whatever that means) shouldn't be the problem this writer makes it out to be.
There is is!
Rome picks and choose which parts of the words of Jesus to be literal and allegorical.
Where will we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life.
Bkmk
Squirrel!
For everyone’s enlightenment:
TRANSUBSTANTIATION
The complete change of the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s body and blood by a validly ordained priest during the consecration at Mass, so that only the accidents of bread and wine remain. While the faith behind the term itself was already believed in apostolic times, the term itself was a later development. With the Eastern Fathers before the sixth century, the favored expression was meta-ousiosis, “change of being”; the Latin tradition coined the word transubstantiatio, “change of substance,” which was incorporated into the creed of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The Council of Trent, in defining the “wonderful and singular conversion of the whole substance of the wine into the blood” of Christ, added “which conversion the Catholic Church calls transubstantiation” (Denzinger 1652). after transubstantiation, the accidents of bread and wine do not inhere in any subject or substance whatever. Yet they are not make-believe they are sustained in existence by divine power. (Etym. Latin trans-, so as to change + substantia, substance: transubstantio, change of substance.)
All items in this dictionary are from Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life. Used with permission.
” Orthodox Christianity (not Eastern Orthodox) holds to the “Hypostatic Union” of Christ. This means that we believe that Christ is fully God and fully man. This was most acutely defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.”
Just who do you think ran that council and arrived at its dogamtic conclusion, the reformers of the 16th century?
“Christ’s body cannot be at more than one place at a time, much less at millions of places across the world every Sunday during Mass. In this sense, I believe that any real physical presence view denies the definition of Chalcedon and the principles therein.”
Nonsense. What silly protestant comic book theology. Your god is a very limited god, but then again, the weed of heresy always, always, always bears bitter fruit!
You posted an article which was a serious attempt to argue against the dogma. I took you, the article, and its author seriously and posted a response to the claims and argumentsmof the article.z I thought it was wonderful that the author went to the Chalcedonian Definition. That's an attempt at some pretty high thought.
But then the conversation decayed into silliness, abuse, and even a kind of a rejection of conversation. It's not adult.Does this build up the body of Christ?