Did the Church Fathers teach transubstantiation?

[Micosil]

Yep – I’m cool with that.

Maybe a better way for me to say it, then, is that they’d have to agree that Reformation theology is deficient in terms of what the Eucharist implies with respect to its assertions, in contradiction to the traditions held by Catholics and Orthodox, dating from the founding of the Church. Fair enough?

Yes, that sounds more precise and would include all of these Churches, Catholic and non-Catholic.

 

[Markie_Boy]

But why do we still need a sacrifice if Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was sufficient. He did say “It is finished” I believe.

 

[Church_Militant]

It seems like Catholics always stop short and don’t include this part of the passage:

If he is speaking literally, did he literally say in 6:63-64 “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.”

What do you make of this statement please? This is a hard one for me to not see as Jesus clarifying he didn’t mean to literally eat his flesh.

I’d love to receive communion tomorrow if my heart and mind were there. Actually my heart keeps leading me that way, but my mind isn’t yet.

It seems like Fundamentalists always try to twist the scriptures to suit their own doctrines instead of reading and living according to what is actually there. Look at this, then read the whole article in context at the link.

Their Main Argument

For Fundamentalist writers, the scriptural argument is capped by an appeal to John 6:63: “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” They say this means that eating real flesh is a waste. But does this make sense?

Are we to understand that Christ had just commanded his disciples to eat his flesh, then said their doing so would be pointless? Is that what “the flesh is of no avail” means? “Eat my flesh, but you’ll find it’s a waste of time”—is that what he was saying? Hardly.

The fact is that Christ’s flesh avails much! If it were of no avail, then the Son of God incarnated for no reason, he died for no reason, and he rose from the dead for no reason. Christ’s flesh profits us more than anyone else’s in the world. If it profits us nothing, so that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ are of no avail, then “your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished” (1 Cor. 15:17b–18).

In John 6:63 “flesh profits nothing” refers to mankind’s inclination to think using only what their natural human reason would tell them rather than what God would tell them. Thus in John 8:15–16 Jesus tells his opponents: “You judge according to the flesh, I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone that judge, but I and he who sent me.” So natural human judgment, unaided by God’s grace, is unreliable; but God’s judgment is always true.

And were the disciples to understand the line “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and life” as nothing but a circumlocution (and a very clumsy one at that) for “symbolic”? No one can come up with such interpretations unless he first holds to the Fundamentalist position and thinks it necessary to find a rationale, no matter how forced, for evading the Catholic interpretation. In John 6:63 “flesh” does not refer to Christ’s own flesh—the context makes this clear—but to mankind’s inclination to think on a natural, human level. “The words I have spoken to you are spirit” does not mean “What I have just said is symbolic.” The word “spirit” is never used that way in the Bible. The line means that what Christ has said will be understood only through faith; only by the power of the Spirit and the drawing of the Father (cf. John 6:37, 44–45, 65).

Christ in the Eucharist

 

[Micosil]

But why do we still need a sacrifice if Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was sufficient. He did say “It is finished” I believe.

Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was once and for all. I will attempt to address your query with the help of Catholic Answers apologists.

Senior Catholic Answers apologist Jimmy Akin has an excellent blog entry on this here.

In a nutshell, Jimmy Akin seems to argue this way:

He starts off with precisely what I said in my previous posts; it is only Protestants that took the sacrificial context out of the liturgy.

He then points out how early Church Fathers and other sources, some dating to the first century when atleast some of the Apostles were still alive, understood the Eucharist/Mass as sacrificial.

Thirdly, he shows how the idea of the Mass being sacrificial is backed up by Scripture (for example, Hebrews 9:23, “Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.”)

Fourth, when one says “sacrifice”, it need not refer to a bloody, painful offering such as the ones of the Old Covenant of goats, doves and whatnot, or of Christ’s atoning death on the cross. For example, in Romans 12:1, Paul implores people as follows: “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” This is also echoed in Paul VI’s Credo of the People of God: “… likewise the bread and wine consecrated by the priest are changed into the body and blood of Christ enthroned gloriously in heaven, and we believe that the mysterious presence of the Lord, under what continues to appear to our senses as before, is a true, real and substantial presence.”

Finally, this non-bloody sacrificial understanding is linked to Hebrews 9:23, as it’s in the plural (sacrifices), for later in Hebrews 9:25-26, the same author asserts that a bloody sacrifice only happened once, as it involves suffering (“Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the Holy Place yearly with blood not his own; for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.”). So, to not come across a contradictory reading, the reading of Hebrews 9:23-26 must mean that multiple non-bloody living sacrifices occur but one bloody sacrifice happened. The former happen at Mass, the latter once and for all at Calvary.

 

[Gorgias]

But why do we still need a sacrifice if Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was sufficient. He did say “It is finished” I believe.

There’s a lot of ground to cover, in answering this question. It’s probably the most important question to ask, in the context of what Jesus meant regarding the ‘memorial’ of the Last Supper and His commands to ‘eat my body and drink my blood’!

Part of the discussion has to happen on the level of language – that is, what exactly does the Greek of the Gospels tell us: after all, the evangelists were using all the tools that the Greek language gave them, and therefore, we need to understand all the subtleties that were at their disposal and which they utilized!

First, though, a question: if “it is finished” meant what you say it means, then wouldn’t that make Jesus a liar – or at least, horribly inconsistent? If, in the Gospel of John, He says “you must eat my body and drink my blood or else you have no life in you”, and at the Last Supper He identifies the Passover bread and wine as His body and blood, and then, on the cross, He says “it is finished”, then doesn’t this mean that He set up a requirement for us that He completely made impossible for us to fulfill? I mean, there wasn’t a whole lot of time between Holy Thursday and Good Friday to have this memorial meal, and if “it is finished” means “sorry, no more memorials now”, then He’s kind of left us in the lurch, hasn’t He? After all, no “body and blood” means “no life within you,” doesn’t it?

Let’s look at the Greek, though: the sentence Jesus uttered (in John 19:30) is “Τετέλεσται.” Sometimes, it’s translated as “it is finished,” but there’s more to the story than that. That word – in that form – is used in only one other place in the Gospels: John 19:28 (“After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst.”) Here, the word ‘accomplished’ is used as the translation. There’s still another place to see the root word (telos) used, though: in Mt 5:48, Jesus tells us “be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect.” So, which is it? Does telos mean ‘perfect’ or ‘accomplished’ or ‘finished’? In fact, a telos is a ‘goal’ – so Jesus means that God perfectly fulfills the goal of His existence, and we should strive to do the same. In John 19, then, the use of τετέλεσται conveys that sense of ‘completion’ or ‘goal-achievement’. Jesus tells us that His redemptive sacrifice of self has reached fulfillment.

What does that mean for us, though, in the context of the Eucharist? Well, as Micosil points out, our ‘sacrifice’ of the Eucharist is not a re-sacrificing of Christ: that happened once and for all. What it is, however, is a re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ, so that we actually are doing a Semitic-style memorial – one in which the action of the sacrifice is memorialized and re-presented, so that the act itself is brought to mind.

It would be odd, then, to suggest that, since Jesus asked for a memorial of the offering of His body and blood – on a night in which Jews re-present a memorial of the Passover event in Egypt! – be eschewed simply because Jesus pronounced His sacrifice to be efficacious as He died on the cross!

 

[guanophore]

This has really been on my mind of late. I can very much see the Real Presence, but Transubstantiation seems to move that to a different thing.

The thing that stands out to me is in John 6, after saying “Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life…”, he shortly after says “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life.”

This does not promote to me that we need to eat his literal flesh. To clarify, I think of Real Presence as His Spirit being present.

I am a learning, hopefully growing Christian - trying to stay open minded, and learning to love first.

In this passage, Jesus is speaking of the human incapacity to understand the mysteries of God. He is telling his listeners that their carnal attempts to understand His teaching, which is Spiritual in nature, will fall short. They needed to accept what He was telling them, even though they could not understand it. The Apostles did this. They did not understand Him either, but they did know He had the words of eternal life, and there was no where else to go.

Jesus was not speaking of His own flesh and blood. If he were, then HIs sacrifice on the cross would be “of no avail”. Clearly this is not right, because His sacrifice is the propitiation for our sins.

Seriously searching on this one, no offense please.

If he is speaking literally, did he literally say in 6:63-64 “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.”

What do you make of this statement please? This is a hard one for me to not see as Jesus clarifying he didn’t mean to literally eat his flesh.

In 6:67 when He asked “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

This was in alignment with what Jesus said in 6:63. Peter didn’t say you alone have the flesh of eternal life, but the words.

Jesus is saying that His words are Spirit and Life. His words are that we are to eat His flesh, and drink His Blood. He held up the bread, and told them “this is my Body” and the cup, saying “this is the cup of my blood”. They are the signs of the new covenant, which join us to Him in His death and resurrection. They are literally changed, and His Presence becomes Real in them.

Again the Greek may help you hear. As the conversation progresses, Jesus makes it clear that He literally means to “eat” his flesh, using the word trogo meaning to gnaw or to crunch. He is talking about chewing with the teeth.

 

[guanophore]

I am in this in between, not able to fully see the eucharist as the church teaches it, but not willing to stand and deny it either.

Why is it so hard, and not so clear? And why do so many well educated theologically deny it?

One thing - if it is the true body of Christ it would be the most powerful thing on this earth in my mind. Yet I see so many I know take it every week, but their lives do not reflect it.

Thanks all for putting up with me.

This is a good question, Marc. I am inclined to think that it is hubris. We want to be able to mentally grasp everything, and it is hard for us to accept that certain truths are beyond our human conception.

I also think that most of the people who receive the Eucharist are in a state of mortal sin at the time, or are not true believers. Polls show that the majority of persons identifying as Catholic do not believe Jesus’ teaching on this matter.

I am going to ask you guys to help me with a few other things too.

But staying on topic - he did say “Do this in memory of me.” That can be twisted too I know, as to that he did not say to consume my flesh and have life in you, but just to remember remember Him.

Any thoughts?

The Greek may help you here too, Marc. The word for “in memory” is anamnesis. It is the opposite of the root where we get our word “amnesia”. God wants us to be continually mindful. Anamnesis is also the word used to describe the Passover, from which the Eucharist was born. It is an enacted, sacred, ceremonial meal where a real lamb (not symbolic) is killed and eaten by the participants.

But why do we still need a sacrifice if Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross was sufficient. He did say “It is finished” I believe.

Jesus was sacrificed once for our sins. There was only one Exodus from Egypt, which was memorialized yearly in the anamnesis of the Passover. The Passover allowed successive generations to enter into and celebrate the reality of the Exodus. In the same way, Eucharist enables us to enter into and partake of the once for all sacrifice of Christ.

If flesh and blood were of no avail, then His sacrifice on the cross would not have been sufficient. He was not speaking of His own flesh and blood.