I couldn’t agree with you more!
Why don’t we just take it at face value? In both passages I mentioned, I think it is pretty clear what was meant since Jesus clarified that he was speaking in spiritual terms and conveying spiritual truths via physical expressions. If you take it at “face value” then it’s pretty clear that Jesus was speaking literally. Otherwise, in John 6:66, when the first of His disciples walked away because this was a “hard thing to believe” He would have had a moral obligation to call them back and clarify that He was only speaking spiritually, not literally. In fact, Jesus let them walk away and turned to the Apostles and asked if they were going to leave, too, over this doctrine!
BTW, how does transubstantiation benefit the believer any more than the belief in the real spiritual presence of Christ in the elements? Are we to believe protein makes us more holy than carbohydrates?! That is why Christ said “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.” (John 6:63) 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).
Among those Protestants who practice exegesis, there is agreement on the fundamentals of the faith. This was demonstrated in the document entitled The Gospel of Jesus Christ: An Evangelical Celebration, which was signed by Protestants from many different denominations in 1999. The signers of the declaration might disagree on non-essential doctrines, but they all agree on what the Bible says about the essentials.
Also, it is unfair of you to have ommitted from your list Old Catholics, the Western Schism, and many other smaller schisms within the Catholic Church, such as the Schism of Utrecht. I don’t think it was unfair. I think those groups were insignificant. This forum doesn’t allow for large posts of thousands of words, remember. We have to be somewhat brief.
Yes, Satan is a divider, and unity is good. But the Bible does not advocate unity at the expense of the purity of the Church. St. Paul told the Corinthians to “Expel the wicked man from among you.” (1 Corinthians 5:13). The Reformation called out numerous evils within the Church. The Pope and Bishops would not own up to it, and so many Christians split from the Catholic Church. Others worked within the Catholic Church and brought about the Counter-reformation. The division still exists, however, because the Counter-reformation addressed the many political and moral evils that existed within the Church, but did not acknowledge that this moral depravity had adversely impacted the doctrine of the Church. From the beginning of the Church, there were problems with people being in error. But not the Church’s doctrine. There were heresies which cropped up and had to be addressed by the Church, usually by some formal declaration as the result of a Council. Luther identified several real problems with certain practices by some in the Church, although the wrong things they were doing were not according to Church doctrine, but their own errors. Rather than patiently correct these errors, he chose, through his own authority, to separate from the Church. And even that wouldn’t have been successful had there not been a group of royalty in the northern third of Europe (mostly Germany) who backed him for political and monetary gain. And even then, Luther regretted, later, what Protestantism became, with its constant splintering and self-interpretation of Scriptures by the unlearned and untrained. I doubt he would recognize the doctrines of most Protestant denominations today, and would, undoubtedly, rail against them like he did the Catholic Church.
You are mistaken. Peter is talking about the prophet’s interpretation, not the hearer’s of the prophets. In effect he is saying that the prophets did not go about teaching whatever they wanted, but instead they spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (2 Peter 1:21) Be careful about taking passages out of context to support your argument! You just accused me of doing this very thing (although, I might note, you did not show how I took the Scripture I quoted out of context - in fact, I included more context than was originally given)! By prophecy, he simply means anything that Scripture teaches (prophecy does not always mean predicting the future). For this reason, we must avoid the temptation to evaluate passages by simply asking, “What do I think this verse means?” Christ gave the Church teachers, and he did so for a very specific reason: to assist people in how to understand Scripture and its teachings. Therefore, rather than simply looking to private interpretations, we must look to the public interpretation of Scripture, which is what the Church has. We must read Scripture in the context of what the Church has historically understood it to mean, for it was the Church that Christ established as “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).
:nope::knight2: