No, I’m assuming that the plain sense of the words is correct.
Personally, I see the doctrine of transubstantiation as saying God lies: He lets us see and feel and taste bread, but it isn’t actually bread, and the same with the wine. I consider God to be honest and not someone who would play such games.
Of course it does – otherwise there’s no reason to invoke Aristotelian terms when they go against the plain language of the Apostle.
No, I don’t – that’s Roman indoctrination seeping through again. Christ’s words establish that the bread is Body and the wine is Blood. He uses language plainly there, just as Paul does when he calls it bread. The only reason to think it isn’t breaad is not the words of Christ or Paul but because of Aristotle.
No, that follows from the nature of the promise to the Apostles as a group.
No, because it was a broken council. Both sides believed and taught the same things; the decision as the council made it was done on the basis of political direction from the Emperor, not on scripture or prayer. Indeed it was made as it was to spite Rome!
Scripture yes but not only Scripture. Especially because as i have already shown there wasn’t an agreement regarding the Canon. I have already shown this multiple times. So it’s kind of a
First, you say you are not assuming a remaining-bread ontology, but only “the plain sense of the words.” But that is exactly where the hidden assumption enters. The words themselves do not yield the conclusion you want unless you first assume that sacramental language must map directly onto underlying ontology. Paul calls it bread, yes. But Paul also says that the bread is a participation in the body of Christ, and that unworthy reception makes one guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. So the “plain sense” is not simply “it is ordinary bread.” The plain sense is that Paul continues to speak of the consecrated element as bread while also attributing to it a reality so serious that profaning it is profaning the body and blood of Christ. The question, then, is not whether Paul uses the word “bread,” but whether that word settles the metaphysical question in the way you want. It does not.
So when you say, “I’m just following the plain sense,” that is not quite true. You are following one part of the language in isolation and then treating it as though it controlled the rest. But it does not. The text gives you both continued bread-language and very strong realist language. Your conclusion comes only when you decide in advance that the bread-language must function as an ontological veto against any deeper account of conversion. That is not simply “plain sense”, that’s already interpretation.
Second, your objection that transubstantiation would make God a deceiver is rhetorically forceful, but conceptually weak. It assumes that if something appears under the accidents or sensible qualities of bread, it must therefore still be bread in the same underlying sense. But that is precisely the point in dispute because the senses truly apprehend what remains perceptible: taste, color, extension, texture, and so on. No deception occurs when the senses report appearances accurately. The philosophical question is whether appearances exhaust reality. And unless you are prepared to say that reality is always identical with what the senses immediately disclose, your objection proves far too much.
In fact, on your principle, a great deal of Christian theology becomes impossible. Christ looked like a mere man. Was God therefore “deceiving” people because divinity was not immediately perceptible to sight and touch? Of course not. The senses reported appearances truthfully; they did not, by themselves, disclose the full ontological reality. That is not deception. It is simply the difference between appearance and essence. So the claim that transubstantiation makes God dishonest is not really an argument, it’s merely an assertion built on an unargued empiricism.
Third, you keep saying that Aristotle is being placed over Scripture, but that is still not what is happening. No one is deriving the Real Presence from Aristotle. The reality comes from Christ’s words and Paul’s language (and you also recognized the real presence, real and not symbolic). Aristotelian terms are invoked only later to clarify how one may speak coherently of a real change without denying the continued sensible appearances. In other words, Aristotle is functioning instrumentally, not authoritatively. The authority belongs to revelation; the philosophical vocabulary is merely an explanatory tool. Unless you want to say that the Church may never use conceptual terminology not found in the Bible, your criticism fails. And if you do want to say that, then you have created a problem not just for Eucharistic doctrine, but for the whole classical Christian tradition, including the language used to defend the Trinity and the Incarnation.
Fourth, your own position is much less “plain” than you make it sound. You say Christ’s words establish that the bread is Body and the wine is Blood, while Paul still calls it bread. But that combination does not by itself solve anything. It leaves open the precise relation between what appears as bread and what Christ declares it to be.
You are effectively insisting that the bread remains bread in a strong ontological sense and that Christ’s body is somehow also present. But that model is not given by the text itself. It is your own metaphysical synthesis.
Fifth, your move on Chalcedon is also much weaker than it first appears. You say that the necessity of ecumenical conciliarity “follows from the nature of the promise to the Apostles as a group.” But that does not follow at all without substantial further argument. The promise to the Apostles as a group certainly supports the Church’s corporate and apostolic character. It does not, by itself, establish a detailed constitutional rule that every later doctrinal clarification must occur only through a universally recognized ecumenical council. That is an inference you are making, not something that simply falls out of the text or out of Chalcedon as a historical event.
More importantly, even at the level of history, Chalcedon does not prove your broader claim. That a doctrine was defined at an ecumenical council in the fifth century does not establish that this is the only possible or legitimate mode of authoritative doctrinal clarification for all later centuries under radically different conditions. It certainly shows that councils mattered and that the ancient Church acted synodally. No one disputes that. But it does not give you a universal historical law that every later doctrinal act lacking identical ecumenical conditions is therefore null. To get that conclusion, you need an additional ecclesiological premise. And that premise is exactly what is under dispute.
Sixth, your treatment of Chalcedon itself is curiously self-defeating. You appeal to it as a model of genuine ecclesial authority, but then immediately describe it as a “broken council,” politically directed, and not decided on the basis of Scripture or prayer. But if that is your own account of Chalcedon, then Chalcedon becomes a very unstable foundation for the point you want to make. A council cannot simultaneously function as your standard for authentic ecumenicity and as an example of political distortion so severe that its outcome was effectively compromised. Once you say that, you are no longer appealing to Chalcedon as a decisive norm. You are appealing to your own preferred reconstruction of what a council ought to have been, and then judging the actual council by that standard.
So respectfully, I do not think your position is as simple or as “plainly biblical” as you suggest. It depends on several unargued premises: that sensory appearance must settle ontology, that philosophical clarification is illegitimate when used by others but permissible when smuggled in by yourself, that apostolic collegiality entails a rigid later constitutional rule, and that a council can serve as a normative model even after you have effectively undercut its authority by describing it as politically broken. .
The Fathers absolutely regarded Scripture as inspired, supreme, and normative; but they did not treat Scripture as the only normative rule or the only measure in the later Protestant sense. They also regarded apostolic Tradition as binding, and they located the authoritative preservation of that Tradition in the Church. That is precisely why your reduction of 2 Thessalonians 2:15 to “it’s called Scripture” is inadequate. Paul explicitly speaks of traditions handed on “by word of mouth or by letter,” and the Fathers did not simply collapse the former into private textual reconstruction.
Irenaeus is especially clear. In Against Heresies 3.4.1, he writes: “For how should it be if the apostles themselves had not left us writings? Would it not be necessary… to follow the course of the tradition which they handed down?” That is a direct statement that apostolic Tradition is normative even apart from the written texts. And in Against Heresies3.3.1–3, he says that, through episcopal succession, “the ecclesiastical tradition from the apostles, and the preaching of the truth, have come down to us.” So for Irenaeus, the apostolic faith is not preserved by isolated readers reconstructing doctrine from documents; it is preserved in the Church through succession and transmission.
Tertullian makes the same point from a slightly different angle. In Prescription Against Heretics 37, he says that truth belongs to those who walk according to “the rule, which the church has handed down from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God.” He adds that heretics are not even to be allowed a straightforward appeal to Scripture, because the prior question is whether they stand within that apostolic rule of faith. And the chapter heading itself states the point with unusual force: the Scriptures are “a deposit, committed to and carefully kept by the Church.” That is not sola scriptura. It is Scripture within apostolic Tradition and ecclesial custody.
Basil of Caesarea is even more explicit. In On the Holy Spirit 27.66, he writes: “Some we possess derived from written teaching; others… by the tradition of the apostles; and both… have the same force.” That is about as decisive as a patristic text can be. Basil does not say that unwritten apostolic Tradition is optional, secondary in authority, or merely devotional. He says that written teaching and apostolic Tradition “have the same force” in the life of the Church. Any claim that, for the Fathers, only Scripture was normative has to explain away Basil’s words, not merely ignore them.
Vincent of Lérins says the same in hermeneutical form. In the Commonitory 2, he says Catholics must “interpret the sacred Canon according to the traditions of the Universal Church” and according to “universality, antiquity, consent.” That is crucial, because Vincent is addressing precisely the problem your position creates: if everyone quotes Scripture, how is orthodoxy distinguished from heresy? His answer is not “Scripture alone interpreted by the individual,” but Scripture interpreted within the Church’s universal Tradition.
So the patristic pattern is consistent: Scripture is foundational and uniquely inspired, but apostolic Tradition is also normative, and the Church is the living custodian of both. That means your answer to 2 Thessalonians 2:15 ( “They do; it’s called Scripture” ) is too narrow. It silently drops Paul’s explicit distinction between oral and written transmission, and it replaces the Fathers’ ecclesial model of preservation with a later reconstructive one. The Fathers do not say, “Once the apostles die, the Church’s task is simply to infer doctrine from texts.” They say, rather, that the apostolic deposit remains in the Church through tradition, succession, rule of faith, and the Church’s received interpretation of Scripture.
In short: your claim that “according to the Fathers, Scripture was the measure of doctrine” is only half true, and therefore misleading. Yes, Scripture is a measure of doctrine. But for the Fathers, it is not the only measure, nor does it function apart from apostolic Tradition and the Church’s living custody of the faith. Once that is seen, your attempt to reduce Paul’s “hold fast to the traditions” to Scripture alone hardly looks patristic.
The flaw in your reply is simple: you are treating “oral tradition from the apostles” as though it ceased to have any normative ecclesial relevance once the apostles died, unless one wants to “pretend” to apostolic authority. But the Fathers do not reason that way. They distinguish between new apostolic revelation, which no one claims, and the ongoing preservation and transmission of apostolic teaching, which they absolutely do claim. That is exactly why your answer misses Paul’s point. Paul does not say, “Once we die, reduce everything to later private textual inference.” He tells the Church to hold fast to what it has received. The Fathers understood that to mean Scripture and apostolic Tradition, preserved in the Church.
P.s: I have to admit, I’d never struggled with any addictions before, but after discovering this forum, I seem to have developed one. LOL. This forum is genuinely addictive. If I’m not careful, it’s going to cause me problems — like two days ago, when I was out to dinner with my soon-to-be wife and had to resist the urge to post here.
I do not want to argue here more about a doctrine that is not directly related to the interface of faith and science.
Instead, I want to point out that the interpretations of the words of Jesus (and the rest of the scriptures) are interpretations. We can read them in a literal sence, as @St.Roymond does here, or we can interpret them through an alternative hermeneutical framework. The problem with literal interpretations is that we either have to select which passages we interpret as literal and which not, or we try to interpret everything literally and end up in problems.
As an example, in this report we should take into account everything that is said, both the ‘this is my body’/’blood’ and the command ‘do this in remembrance of me’.
We should also think about the immediate context: Jesus, in flesh and blood, is situated by the table when telling this. The flesh and blood is by the table, not on the table, despite the words..
On the other hand, the context associates the words with the Paschal lamb that was eaten to remember what happened during the story of Exodus. There you can see both the eating of the flesh and the remembrance. Did Jesus make this association in a symbolic sense? Definitely but that does not tell how deep the association was intended to be (eating of the flesh).
By the way, Hebrews did not drink the blood of the Paschal lamb, that would have been absolutely forbidden. So, the association with the Paschal lamb is not perfect.
We can also try to put the case into the wider context in the teachings of Jesus, in the apostolic telling of the life of Jesus and the gospel, in the long-term plan of God, etc.
One aspect to consider in the interpretation is how the words of Jesus fit to the contemporary Hebrew worldview. It has been said that the greatest schism in the history of Christianity was when the roads of the Hebrew/Jewish Christians and pagan Christians separated. Could the words of Jesus be interpreted differently in the original situation that might even be called a revival movement of Hebrew/Jewish faith vs. in the world where the roots of the Christians were in a pagan culture?
Even after all these analyses, what remains is that we need to interpret what happens. That does not happen objectively. Interpretations are at least partly subjective, reflecting the belief structures of the person interpreting the text. The belief structures are adopted from the teachings we are told. In other words, we interpret what happened through the teachings and examples of our background culture/group/denomination.
