I have found that most Protestants don’t read St. Paul’s epistles that clearly contradict their beliefs. I once had a conversation in a forum with a fundamentalist who never read 2 Thessalonians 2:14 which says, “Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle.” When I said St. Paul told us to hold on to the traditions by word or letter, she wanted the passage because she never heard of it.
It’s amazing how some Protestants will so easily cast aside all reason and logic to hold on to their beliefs.
When the poster formerly known as Againor says Jesus didn’t say, “This is really my body,” he reminds of when I was in third grade at recess. We had to say “I call” whenever we wanted a certain swing or play somewhere on the playground. If I said “I want that swing” it didn’t count because I didn’t say “I call that swing.” Even though I want and I call meant the same thing, I could only get the swing by saying, “I call.” Childish? Of course it is, but we were 8 years old, so what do you expect?
Jay D’s argument that Jesus didn’t say, “This is really…” is just like the playground at recess. If that’s the best he can do, he really needs to re-think his beliefs.
We were indoctrinated in such a way as to believe any explanation that was put forth against Catholic teaching. Part of the technique of Evangelical/Fundamentalist (for example) preaching is rhetorical, to make any argument
sound plausible, if your delivery struck an emotional chord, then nobody ever had a reason to question it.
Now, I’m not saying that this was in any way
deliberately deceptive, because the preachers really believed what they taught, they were themselves taught formulas for doing battle using the Bible
selectively. The real tragedy was that huge portions of Scripture were completely ignored or glossed over as irrelevant to the argument. We were not taught how to look at Scripture in context of
all of Scripture, so that everything was integrated and non-contradictory without doing serious damage to the context.
This is why you will find
a lot of Protestants (of every form) will never have noticed verses like the ones you noted above, they were never part of their overall interpretive system.
And I know that even in reading the Bible from front to back, my mind just completely passed over verses that didn’t make sense to me according to what I
already believed. I think somewhere in my mind I figured that my belief system which had been taught to me by well respected theologians and ministers had to have reasonable explanations for these problem verses or even whole passages, I would simply find them out later.
And I never did. One day I went on a deliberate search to figure it all out when I realized there were gaping holes in my belief system. And I discovered that what I had taken for granted, that the
reasonable explanations were out there, well they just weren’t out there.
Sure, there were explanations. But they were filled with word games, to the point of ridiculousness. And I wondered, is my system so insecure that word games are all that’s left to keep it standing? Bottom line was, yes.
Was I happy to discover all this? NO. My whole world fell apart. But then it came back together again beautifully. The Eucharist
is the center of Christian worship. The Bible teaches it, the Early Church Fathers taught it from the beginning, every orthodox Christian believed it for 1500 years. Word games will not take away the truth of the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
p.s. When I read the Pauline Epistles now, it’s crazy how much more I see there. I feel like I’ve stepped from what had been a beautiful drawing into a fantastic 3 dimensional world. It’s like discovering this world of Living Scripture for the first time!
