Simon Chan makes the following provocative point:
“The Word proclaimed is truly the Word of God. As the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) puts it, ‘The preaching of the word of God is the word of God.’ This is the closest that Protestants get to a doctrine of transubstantiation. Human words do ‘become’ God’s Word in the event of preaching…If this is so, why is it so difficult to believe that created things like bread and wine could ‘become’ the body and blood of Christ in the event of the eucharistic celebration…? Preaching and eucharistic celebration share the same logical function. Could not the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation be understood in a similar way?”
And as one of my seminary professors and well known radio personality ends his sermons and talks, “Now you think about that.”
There is a great difference between a spoken word and material elements, such as bread and wine. When Yeshua said “this is my body… take, eat”, His very own body was offering it to them. Transubstantiation is a fraudulent theory designed to perpetuate the power of the Catholic church and keep it in control of its congregant’s spirituality.
You said: “Transubstantiation is a fraudulent theory designed to perpetuate the power of the Catholic church and keep it in control of its congregant’s spirituality.”
The same thing could be said of the preaching of the minister in a Protestant church. The person who “speaks God’s Word” to the congregation can very easily perpetuate their power and control the congregation’s spirituality. We see this happen all the time. The similarity between spoken words and material elements, and any other created means that God chooses to use, is that it is the Holy Spirit that make the “thing” effective to accomplish the appropriate end, not that the “thing” in and of itself accomplishes anything.
Whoever defines the terms wins the debate. Sorry, but I’m not allowing you to define the terms for me. There’s hardly a shred of biblical evidence to support the Catholic Church’s theory of transubstantiation. It is tantamount to the worship of a “wafer god”. It is crucifying Jesus over and over again. Rabbi Shaul (Paul) tells us in Romans6:10: “…for His death was a unique event that need not be repeated, but His life, He keeps on living for God”. There are no doctrines or practices in biblical Judaism or Protestantism that quite compare to the erroneous theory of transubstantiation. It is one of many man-made traditions of the Catholic church and a false doctrine for anyone who believes it.
Jesus’ words as recorded in the Gospel of John seem to settle this matter, in my opinion. And yes, the Catholic Church is making a mistake.
Prior to Jesus making the comment about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he characterizes himself as bread: The bread of God, The bread of life, The bread which came/comes down from heaven, The living bread. Then he says that he gives this bread. What does he give it for? Life. The life of the World.
He specifies this bread, already characterized as himself, as his flesh, transitioning into more shocking viceral imagery. What do you do with bread/flesh? You eat it. They both give and sustain life. So when Jesus says the shocking statement that unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you have no life in you, he is simply restating himself, albeit in more ‘graphic’ imagery.
Eating bread is not horrible imagery. Eating a man’s flesh is very horrible. I suggest Jesus repeated himself in more horrible terms because his giving himself for our lives was pretty horrible, yet wonderful too. We are all vultures feasting on his body, drinking his blood, drawing life from his death.
We needed our attention drawn to the fact that our sin makes us cannibals and vultures, creatures that will themselves starve and die, unless someone else dies to provide them nourishment.
It appears to me from the dialouge of Jesus as recorded in John that Jesus was using the verb ‘to eat’ symbolically. Eating him is symbolic. Whether we think of injesting him as bread or as flesh/blood, we are nonetheless eating him for nourishment and life. One is a nice thought, one is a horrible thought. God wants us to see both aspects of what he did for us.
Don’t forget that God can use R rated imagery to shake us up and make us think. The Bible is full of such stuff.
In closing, I think that we are looking at parallel symbolic statements by Jesus, one benign, the other malignant, but both appropriate and true. The malignant symbolism fooled some people back then too, apparently. So Jesus kindly explained to his disciples this ‘hard saying’. He tells them, ‘The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.’ This argues for symbolism existing, not against it.
He cautions them against being offended. After all, It’s God doing the talking and if we find offense in his words, the problem is with us, not God, not his words.
It wasn’t a hard saying, it was just unexpected.
Ok, so thanks for listening to my opinion. Hope you enjoyed it.
Peace.
Virginia boy,
I appreciate your post. This seems to be an area that you have done some work on. Thank you for your addition to this topic. Maybe this “horrible” language and what it captures is really behind the doctrine of transubstantiation?
(I am not here endorsing that view, but simply begging the question. I, like so many others, am guilty of making a judgment on issues before having done a thorough investigation. And we do know that there is oftentimes a difference between the “official doctrine” and how it is perceived, heard, by the people or how it is communicated by opponents.)
Dear Slwolters:
I think we all unavoidably make initial judgments. Doing thorough investigations take time, and in the mean time our minds cry out impatiently for the issue to be settled. I know mine does.
By the way, I appreciate your original ‘food for thought’ point. It is a good one. If our words can become God’s words, then why can’t our wafers become God’s body? If I were going to argue for Transubstantiation I would use this point when arguing. It is perfectly reasonable. Your recognition of the similarity between situations is clever.
I wanted to correct my previous post. It is a technical mistake that I detected when reading over my post and consulting the text again. I don’t think it affects anything I said, but I want to correct it for the record.
The second sentence in the second paragraph reads:
‘Then he says that he gives this bread.’
I need to rewrite this sentence as:
‘Also he says that the Father gives this bread.’
My original sentence was wrong because it indicates Jesus, himself, is the bread giver. The technical bread giver is the Father. Jesus is the bread. In my defense, Jesus did say in the same context that the Son of Man will give ‘food which endures to everlasting life’. But I was wrong to write a sentence that indicates Jesus is the ‘bread’ giver. That is the Father’s role, technically.
In reality, both Jesus and the Father give the ‘bread’. The Father gives the bread as this context says, and Jesus is like a loaf of bread with a mind who chooses to give himself too.
Thankfully, although humbling, this mistake doesn’t affect my presentation, at least I hope not. When Jesus drops the verbal bomb of saying that the bread is his flesh, he is doing so to point out the need for someone to die to provide the life sustaining nourishment. The ‘flesh for life’ idea is dark and weighty, pointing to the seriously high price required for our sin debt to be paid. The ‘bread for life’ idea is bright and joyous, pointing to the graciousness of God. Both ideas are good ones. Both ideas are true. Both ideas are important to understand. But Jesus said the second idea as a way of saying that he was going to die.
Unlike other gods, who use their supposed power and resources to provide goodies for people, Jesus does not use his resources and power. Rather, he gives his life to provide for us. This is part of his message. It shows how impossibly high a price our sin condition requires. In this context, the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus is artistically telling the disciples and the present Jews that the Father is giving him as a sacrifice. In hind sight we all know this is what happened anyway. Would we have understood Jesus to be saying that in artistic terms if we had been there hearing his words on that day? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.
Sorry for getting a little long winded. I could write about this passage and its gospel message implications at length because I find Jesus’ teaching methods to be fascinating. He was amazing. Normal people don’t teach like Jesus did.
In closing, in response to you question above, “Maybe this “horrible” language and what it captures is really behind the doctrine of transubstantiation?” I would say the following. And forgive me if I miss your question’s point a little. If I were a Catholic, believing that I was really eating the body of Christ, in substance, I would definitely be in a state of heightened awareness in regard to the death of Christ and the sacrifice he made for me to live everlastingly. I would wince as I chewed, imagining the destruction that Christ’s body endured. I would understand that I was the killer. Appropriately, I would be aware of the horror of Christ’s death and sacrifice. Maybe that is why God would make his body present in the wafer. (But why not just use meat and blood, and make us eat that as a remembrance? I don’t know, I’m not God.)
But I would not want to ever take communion again because of the evil it was inflicting on my Lord each time I chomped down. I would want to take the wafer and put in in a sealed glass jar on my shelf, protecting it, loving it. But since I believed God wanted me to do this I would keep doing it on a regular basis, regardless of the psychological conflict.
So believing in Transubstantiation is not such a terrible thing in all aspects, but it is troubling to me. I think Jesus has let us off the hook, however, since he never meant to say we are to literally eat his flesh. His symbolic use of the action of ‘eating’ is, in my opinion, par for the course when it comes to the way in which Jesus taught and spoke. If reading Jesus in a reasonable symbolic way eliminates psychological weirdness, I choose that route. I hope I am right. I will know soon enough.
Thanks for letting me post you. I enjoyed it. Take care. God bless.
Peace