I am well aware of the Transubstantiation dogma. Cannot say I really understand in what sense they are saying that it “actually become the body and blood of Christ.” I just know its not true in a measurable scientific sense – as those who believe this will quickly admit. Seems to me, the very definition of symbolic is to say something is other than what it is measured to be. What they say is confusing. When they say it is the body and blood of Christ “in essence” does that or does that not mean they are cannibals “in essence?”
There is no need to get excited and break chairs over my head by equating what I said with calling Jesus a con man… to me that makes less sense than calling your pastor/priest a con man because that bread and wine will not be shown to be flesh and blood by any scientific measurement.
So have you been fooled into thinking your communion is flesh and blood?
Seems to me that nobody is trying to fool anybody since nobody is selling anything. It’s just a matter of personal subjective beliefs and that is all. Those people believed it was wine and they were happy. You believe your communion is the body and blood of Christ and you are happy. Whatever any scientific tests may show doesn’t mean anybody is fooled by anything, right? Seems to me the miracle is that you can believe such a thing.
No. Because that is a spiritual body not a physical body (1 Cor 15). The laws of nature only govern physical things not spiritual things.
I don’t consider Aquinas scripture… just a Christian trying to come of with an explanation of things and not always succeeding. The idea of the spiritual body versus the physical body looks more promising to me as a possible explanation – spiritual transubstantiation perhaps? Still a little too magical for me, because I think the point was to replace the inheritance of the mind we had from God via Adam with a renewed inheritance from Jesus. And that isn’t a matter of genetics or substance but ideas and inspiration.
Seems that Luther was particularly opposed to transubstantiation and so the Lutherans reject it. Other protestants suggest that instead of the bread and liquid being transformed, Christ is simply present in the eucharist. I think the whole point of the introduction of this by Jesus in John 6 was to challenge the excessively materialistic attitudes of those excited by Him feeding the 5000 and to force them to understand things more spiritually. In other words, He wasn’t there for social or government reform but for bringing truth to the mind and life to the spirit.
Then you are trying to fool people with lies about your communion in church. But who was it that was trying to make people believe that water was wine? Nobody. Some people believed it was wine. That is all, and not the same thing.
An additional aspect of the Eucharist, eating the bread and drinking the wine (symbolically the body and blood of Christ) is that of eternal life from God - we are sustained in this life by eating the flesh of dead animals and we all die. It is also understood that life is associated with blood.
In contrast to our current situation, we are provided with eternal life via the forgiveness of sins because of Christ, and eternal life from Him, by the grace of God. Christ instituted this in the last supper so that we may be reminded of what He has done.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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By what laws of nature can an exsanguinated corpse with massive internal injuries rupturing the abdomen, intestines, liver/spleen/pancreas, diaphragm and thoracic contents of a lung and the heart, with every cell of every organ dead, chemically and microbially fermenting for 72 hours, resurrect?
So you don’t believe in a physical resurrection then? Lazarus was not dead either? Jairus’s daughter?
Do you not understand that Jesus’s resurrection had to be actual for people to accept that God has dominium over death? Heaven and Hell are not Jewish doctrines. A spiritual existence was not within their understanding.
Neither do I, but he was a brilliant medieval theologian. Not correct in everything of course. But worth more than a quick visit to Wikipedia. From Aquinas we get the Feast of Corpus Christi, which Anglicans also observe.
Believe what you want, but the resurrection was physical. That’s part of traditional Christianity. The Gnostic Christians, on the other hand, denied the physical resurrection. We had a 15-part course on 1 Corinthians with a theologian who affirmed the traditional view.
At the recent world science festival in Brisbane, Francis Collins was asked what, if anything, would destroy his Christian faith. He answered that finding the bones of Jesus Christ would do it. No physical resurrection = no faith.
Below is a carving of the wedding feast at Cana in on of our chapels. Besides marking the first miracle of Jesus, it is often seen as a foretaste of the marriage supper of the Lamb.
That is true. Jesus said that unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the son of man you shall not have life within you. That didn’t go over so well–many of his followers left him after he said that. What is the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the Eucharist? Is it more like the Real Presence?
This will not come as a surprise to you, as there is a great deal of debate and argument regarding the Eucharist down the centuries. My view is that it is both a mystery and symbolic; I think this site gives a good understanding of the Orthodox belief.
I am not a big fan of the “it is a mystery” answer. For too many people that is equated with “good children don’t ask questions.” On the other hand, accepting that we just don’t know is a good scientific answer. So… I would replace “it is a mystery” with “we don’t know but we can speculate and come up with all kinds of possible answers.”
It depends on how a word like “mystery” is used in a discussion. The context of this discussion is that Christ taught this to his disciples (and then to us) and is accepted, (as a great deal of Christian teaching). With in your comment, I would reply that we would not normally equate bread with flesh, so we would seek to understand what Christ was conveying to us. I think that “it is also a mystery” is appropriate in this context.
Don’t forget advances in Scientific discoveries. You know it is metaphor when a passage conflicts with something we have learned over the past 2,000 years about our solar system and the universe. In addition to the unwarranted punishment of Galileo for saying that the earth was not the center around which the sun rotated, there is the account in Matthew (2 vs.9 NEB) which describes a star that moves through the sky and settles over where the young child was. There is no way to describe that passage other than metaphorically. There is great truth in great metaphors, but we should not insist that they are historical facts.
I don’t agree this is necessarily true. When the Bible talks about the windows of heaven from which the snow comes, or the firmament stretched out like a hammered metal bowl, or barren wombs, it is not “just a metaphor” or “just a figure of speech” it’s insight into the ANE conceptual framework and what they believed was literally true about the world. We have a different conceptual framework for describing how weather works and the structure of the atmosphere, and how human reproduction works, and our conceptual frameworks are informed by scientific realities the ANE authors of the Bible knew nothing about. When you are doing interpretation you want a hermeneutic that gets at the inferences the original audience would have made based on their conceptual frameworks. Just because we know an image isn’t scientifically accurate doesn’t mean the original audience and authors knew the same things. So it’s not a sound approach to the text to say that if an image conflicts with scientific realities it can’t be intended by the author as a literal description, it has to be a metaphor. But also just because something was intended literally doesn’t mean it is “historical fact” either. “Her womb was barren” communicates just fine even if it was not a historical fact that the woman’s fertility issues were due to a problem with her uterus not being able to accept “seed” that was planted there.
Since one realizes that the ancient writers had a world view of nature that was not accurate and prescientific, in order to accept the truth of Biblical passages that contain these descriptions, one needs to understand those descriptions of nature as metaphorical, not historical. This is not about the intention of the writer it is about the understanding of the reader. This is especially true for individuals educated in the Sciences. Too often the truth of the Bible is rejected as anachronistic because of its ancient origins and claims. The key to accessing the truths of the Bible is to understand the human need for spiritual connection and understanding.
