Spiritual Real Presence

However, we do have these references to snakes in the New Testament.

See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. (Luke 10:19; NRSV).​

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Paul had gathered a bundle of brushwood and was putting it on the fire, when a viper, driven out by the heat, fastened itself on his hand. When the natives saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, “This man must be a murderer; though he has escaped from the sea, justice has not allowed him to live.” He, however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm. They were expecting him to swell up or drop dead, but after they had waited a long time and saw that nothing unusual had happened to him, they changed their minds and began to say that he was a god. (Acts 28:3-6, NRSV).​

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Now, please do not misunderstand me, I do NOT handle snakes as a religious practice (but I do remove them from my garden when I run across them and set them free in a nearby wooded area). And it probably is not fitting to discuss snakes in the same thread as the spiritual real presence in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

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I do not wish to hijack this thread on spiritual real presence in the Eucharist. The ending of Mark 16 would make a interesting topic for discussion in a separate thread, as would a thread on manuscript transmission.

...Scottish Monk

 

That is a good point about Paul on Malta.

 

Scottish Monk just started a new thread entitled, "Ending of Gospel of Mark (Chapter 16)" in the Philosophy and Theology section of the forum.

See you there,
Anna

 

After reading this discussion, my faith in the Eucharist has been deepened significantly, as I certainly believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Sacrament.

 

I agree.

Scottish Monk

 

I believe in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the consecrated unleavened bread and wine. Us Catholic Anglicans also genuflect where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, some A.C parishes also have Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament usually after a Solemn Evensong.

 

Here is a good Anglican article about Eucharistic Reservation and the Real Presence.

http://www.anglicanhistory.org/reservation/weston/

 

“Both you and I agree in this, that in the sacrament is the very true and natural Body and Blood of Christ, even that which was born of the Virgin Mary.” Bishop Ridley, Martyr!
(Quoted by Laud, in his Conference with Fisher. pg.35.

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“These Holy Mysteries .....impart in true and real though mystical manner, the very person of Our Lord , Himself whole perfect and entire.”...
(Ecclesiastical Polity.Hooker. v.c.67.)


“ Our formal words are,‘This is My Body:’ ‘This is My Blood: This is more than,‘This figureth or designeth:’ A bare sign is but a phantasm. He gave substance and really subsisting essence, Who said,‘This is My Body:’ ‘This is My Blood’ The catechism saith expressly,‘The Body and Blood are taken and eaten’.....
(Bishop Montague. Answer to Gagger&c.36.)

This is the teaching of some of the Bishops of the Reformation and there are others i.e. Bishop Taylor, Thorndyke and Bishop Forbes and Jolly in his Catechism as well as the british Bishops in their correspondence to the Orthodox.

 

The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is real but spiritual. The matter of the sacrament is bread and wine and they must remain actual bread and wine for it to be a sacrament, the same way water remains water during baptism.

I don't believe that we actually chew on Christ's arms, muscles, bones, veins, etc., and drink His spilt blood. That would indeed be cannibalism, as the pagans accused us of committing, not to mention a cruel and horrific experience for both Christ and the recipient of the sacrament.

 

The Blessed Sacrament, therefore, takes its place among the forms Divine Love wills to use for the expression of Himself as Love poured out. It is the latest expression of the eternal love: latest in time, and latest in development. Latest in time, that is, in man's apprehension of it. For divine love is revealed under successive forms, because mankind thinks successive thoughts. And latest in development, for the consecration of manhood by union with the Word comes, in the succession of ideas, before the taking, by the same Word, of the lower creation into Himself, through the representative creatures bread and wine.

The essential truth of this sacrament is that it makes real to faithful souls the presence of God as He is our Redeemer. It makes real Eternal Love whose nature it is to give Himself. It makes real the Love that took flesh, the Love whose Body was broken and Blood shed, the Love who makes all men one, confirming them in common sonship and mutual fellowship; the Love who is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

And also, by reason that Love has taken manhood into Himself, the sacrament conveys to us who receive Him the very virtues of His own manhood.

Thus God, who is essentially redemptive Love, makes His presence so real to us that we are enabled actually to dwell in Him and He in us. For in the Christ we see Him who is Blessed Trinity, and through Christ's manhood we have, in the Spirit, access to Him. The divine life which the Father ever gives, and the Word ever receives, reaches us through the sacred manhood. The self-oblation of the Eternal Word, in which He ever gives to the Father what He also receives, is expressed to us in the Christ's one, sufficient sacrifice; and we are permitted to share it. In Christ, with Christ, through Christ, we are made part and parcel of that which is offered: caught up into His filial self-oblation, into the inward movement of Eternal Love Himself; while the unity of mankind's association with the divine love is pledged, safeguarded, and enriched down the ages, because Calvary's sacrifice, which most fully expresses the depth of divine love, is continually represented under the sacramental forms. The Body broken, the Blood shed, are symbolically shown under bread and wine; the very manhood now in glory is made real to the eye of faith; while the human will of Christ, that triumphed on Calvary, is evermore the one basis of this mode of God's presence, and the unifying force that subdues all men to His will, and draws them to His heart.

 

No one believes that

 

Except Thomas Aquinas, all the Scholastics and anyone who takes the Romanist idea of Transubstantiation seriously.

Summa Theologica, Part 3, Question 76, Article 4: "Is the whole dimensive quantity of Christ's Body in the Sacrament?"

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/4076.htm#article4

"The existence of the dimensive quantity of any body cannot be separated from the existence of its substance. But in this sacrament the entire substance of Christ's body is present, as stated above (1,3). Therefore the entire dimensive quantity of Christ's body is in this sacrament."

Unfortunately, Papists have universally believed for about 650 years that we chew on every substance of Christ's very incarnate body, which includes bones, flesh, sinews, hair, etc., in their substantial totality.

 

No, it's a caricature. The belief is that the host becomes the Body, not that it becomes arms, legs, veins, or other body parts. And the accidents are real; that's what is being left out here. The substance is the Body, in a form that looks & acts like bread and is consumed like bread. No one thinks that the bread becomes body parts.

 

No one has to believe it becomes individual body parts in order to believe that we consume the full substantial reality of sinews, bones, and such.

Interestingly one of the infamous Eucharistic miracles - in which a wafer turned to literal human flesh - yielded a laboratory test and the tissue they tested came out as cardiac tissue. http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/lanciano.html

 

What constitutes the Real?

Surely Christ's immortal Body is more real than the fading material world...but it is a reality that stands precisely beyond any representation- The Eucharist is a symbolic mediation of a future that cannot be perceived, and yet it isn't mediation but an encounter with something immediate and ineffable...we surely cannot receive (or wish to receive) anything less real than Christ in the Eucharist- and how can Christ be anything less than fully present, how can we participate in something that isn't giving us Christ in his totality if we are to call it a meaningful participation at all?

And yet...nothing that Christ's body did is of any significance so much as what Christ did in the body...the actions themselves were not the meaning of the actions; the physical body of Jesus itself is a symbol...

Does this allow for a legitimate transference of 'body' to bread? Does the risen body give rise to the possibility of a link between body and flesh being liquidated, in becoming bread becoming body is it sign of how the body extends beyond its own materiality? Is this not also at work when we consider the Church to be the body of Christ?

Does this even make sense? I'm not sure it does, I'm sort of just pondering aloud...

 

But that wasn't the question. Someone said that he doesn't believe that we chew on Christ's arms, legs, etc. Again, no one believes that we do.

 

Roman Catholicism does even if it tries to cloak it every now and then. It's logically inescapable: after the consecration there remains no longer any bread or wine whatsoever but solely the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. This is de fide teaching. That's why the bread can logically be adored, for instance.

The accidents of bread and wine that we perceive with our eyes, touch with our hands and sense with our mouth remain there by order of a miracle. In truth, it's a sort of divine illusion: it's really His body and blood that we chew and consume under the appearances of what we call bread and wine.

 

Again, no one believes that we chew on arms, legs, etc. That was the point that I addressed. That's ridiculous. I'm not sure why you guys are so interested in transubstantiation on a board that is so clearly extremely ultra-Protestant, but "chewing on body parts" is not what Catholics believe. If somebody told you that's what they believe, or claimed that's what transubstantiation means, they're mistaken.

 

You disagree with Aquinas, hundreds of Scholastics, much mystical theology of the past 700 years, and theCatechism of the Council of Trent:

http://www.catholicapologetics.info/thechurch/catechism/Holy7Sacraments-Eucharist.shtml

On the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist

the pastor should explain that in this Sacrament are contained not only the true body of. Christ and all the constituents of a true body, such as bones and sinews, but also Christ whole and entire.

Old Christendom and myself are both former Catholics. We're not totally ignorant of the implications of the barbarity that is Transubstantiation. Rome herself gladly supplies proof.

 

Nobody had to tell me what Catholics believe, I've been a Roman Catholic my whole life and a traditional one for the past 7 years.