Literal or symbolic? Partaking of the flesh and blood

  • Thread starter Thread starter cody.helscel
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Reuben_J said:
40.png
benjamin1973:
I’m not arguing against Jesus. I just don’t think that “partaking of the flesh and blood” can be taken as literal. Nobody ever ate bread and threw up muscle tissue; no coroner ever pulled out human tissue from a stomach so far as I’ve ever heard.

To me, that’s obviously because bread is bread, and it is not muscle tissue. If you want to say, “We’re talking about a spiritual nourishment,” or “Jesus meant that ALL nourishment is a gift of the Lord, and that all things in the world of of Him and His grace,” then okay.
Click to expand...
Literal here means the bread and the wine have become the Body and Blood of Jesus. That’s what it means by literal. They are not symbolic of his Body and Blood but his true Body and true Blood.

That has to be made clear.

The other issue is whether the bread and the wine have changed literally into muscle and human blood. Nobody said that, not even Jesus, which is also not found in the John Gospel.

They are two different issues.

Therefore, one has to work on from the first paragraph - how is that the bread and the wine have become the true Body and true Blood of Jesus as Jesus said they would? The answer for that is the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation.
Click to expand...
If it is literally changed into the body of Jesus, but “literal body” does not mean “muscles and other tissue,” then what does literally mean? If it is not muscles and tissue, then it is not body-- it must be something else.

If the body of Jesus is different than the body of a normal person, then why is He called a man? If the body of Jesus is the same as the body of a normal person, then why isn’t his body literal flesh and blood, i.e. the kind that can be tested medically?
 
Last edited:
benjamin1973 said:
If it is literally changed into the body of Jesus, but “literal body” does not mean “muscles and other tissue,” then what does literally mean? If it is not muscles and tissue, then it is not body-- it must be something else.

If the body of Jesus is different than the body of a normal person, then why is He called a man? If the body of Jesus is the same as the body of a normal person, then why isn’t his body literal flesh and blood, i.e. the kind that can be tested medically?
Click to expand...
Hi. It is referred to the glorified body of Jesus.

Transubstantiation - the conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine still remaining.
 
I think I’m going to have to give up on this one. If it has the appearance of bread and wine, and presumably the same chemical composition, then it has not changed physically. It is still bread and wine, and is not other than that.

If you say that the spiritual body of Christ infuses normal food, such that it nourishes the soul much as the bread nourishes the body, then okay. But it’s pretty clear that you are not saying that. You are saying the bread-seeming material is not in fact bread but is the body of Christ.

Are you also saying that other foods are not the body of Christ, and that the Eucharistic ritual is involved in the transubstantiation? Or can I eat my corn-on-the-cob or whatever and offer a prayer of thanks to God for providing me His heavenly flesh for my consumption?
 
That is why some disciples said it was a hard teaching and many of them could not accept it and left.

It (the teaching) was not fully understood at that point in time. Remember that cannibalism and drinking of blood was atrociously condemned in Judaism.

Jesus was speaking about himself as the second person of the Trinity. The teaching was making sense after the resurrection when the fullness of his identity was understood and made known. The experience of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus testify to that.

Now they knew it was literal and not symbolic.
 
Last edited:
Do you believe the omnipotent God can change the substance of bread and wine while maintaining the physical attributes or is that beyond his power?
 
Can God make a round square?

Language has no meaning with this kind of question, at least so far as I can see yet. If something is still bread, then it hasn’t changed. If it is no longer bread but something else, it has changed.

But let’s walk through this. Are you saying that the bread, once eaten, is now flesh that just looks like bread? I don’t find this plausible.
 
Last edited:
cody.helscel said:
One Protestant told me different people believe it is symbolic to partake in Christ’s flesh and blood. I understand Catholics teach that it’s literal because Christ (aka God) said, “this IS my flesh…”.
Click to expand...
There is a very simple rebuttal to this that can only bring silence:
“Do you believe that Jesus Christ is God in-carn-ate?” The in-carn-ation means that God has taken on “carne” or flesh.

Christ is God in the flesh. Is this symbolic, or did Christ really walk the earth in time and space and flesh?
The protestant separation of scripture from Christ himself causes some serious problems.
 
Last edited:
It’s a good analogy but it has a problem, as do all analogies. In the incarnation Jesus is fully God and fully man. With transubstantiation the bread is only there in accidents.
 
Elf01 said:
It’s a good analogy but it has a problem, as do all analogies. In the incarnation Jesus is fully God and fully man. With transubstantiation the bread is only there in accidents.
Click to expand...
Analogies always fail in regard to God.
The bigger point is the threshold of belief that is asked for by God. If you can accept that God took on full human nature, the Eucharist should be no problem. Both are equally scandalous to skepticism.
 
I am personally not Roman Catholic, I am Lutheran. As stated above, we take Christ at his word. When Christ makes a promise, we receive the promise. Our take on the Real Presence is slightly different than the doctrine of transubstantiation. We don’t really subscribe to the Platonic reasoning that Aquinas uses when describing what happens in the sacrament of Communion. We know that we receive the bread and the wine as a physical element. And through Jesus’ promise we know we receive his body and blood. So we believe that we receive the body and blood in, with, and under, the bread and the wine, which is a way of saying, we accept the promise even if we don’t understand how Christ accomplishes it. It’s not my understanding that makes it efficacious, it is faith. This is why Paul refers to the sacrament of communion as a mystery. Baptism is no less mysterious, is it not? During baptism I do not physically die and become resurrected to Christ; however, God’s word says we do. I accept God’s promise at face value. Hope that helps.
 
The fact that His body looks like bread nd His blood looks like wine is just an accident.
 
Last edited:
I do not think the doctrine of Transubstantiation is too difficult to understand. Even those who do not believe in it do understand what it means.

I think you just refuse to accept the explanation.
 
What did Jesus mean at the last supper when he took the bread and said "this is my body:?
 
Benjamin, The idea of eating someone’s flesh has been disturbing people since Jesus told us to do this very thing. This is why He lost many followers. Our Lord, in His goodness, does not demand that we eat something that, to our senses, appears to be bloody raw flesh. Instead, He makes it appear as bread.

To our physical senses, it is ordinary bread. By every detectable means, it is ordinary bread. Disguising it this way is a merciful act so that it is possible for us to comply with His command that we partake of His body. Once consecrated, it really is His Body, whether you choose to use the term “literal” or not. It is important that we eat His flesh, because He is the sacrificial Lamb. The sacrificial animal was always eaten after the sacrifice. Jesus was sacrificed, and every generation will eat Him until He returns.

Think of the angels who appeared to men in the Old Testament. They looked, acted and even felt like normal humans. Angels were able to grab Lot by the hand and drag him away from Sodom. Jacob wrestled with an angel. The angels were even able to sit down at a table and eat normal food.

To our human senses, they had every appearance of normal human beings, but they were not human, but pure spirits under the appearance of human flesh. Just as the Eucharist is Jesus, under the appearance of bread. It is a miracle, and we have to accept it as such.
 
The difference is that we can’t do an autopsy on angels, but we can see in vomit or in an autopsy that the Eucharist has all the same chemical properties that it had before we ate it.

Things in the physical realm are defined by their physical properties-- in this case the chemical and physical properties of bread. Seeming to have chemical properties and having them is exactly the same.

So long as the Eucharist maintains those properties, I wouldn’t say “It seems like bread but it’s really something else.” I’d say something like, “The Lord has permeated the bread, adding an additional dimension of spiritual nourishment that normal bread cannot provide.”
 
benjamin1973 said:
but we can see
Click to expand...
“We can see”…Like I said earlier, to our senses it is bread, but our senses deceive us regarding the Eucharist.
benjamin1973 said:
I wouldn’t say “It seems like bread but it’s really something else.”
Click to expand...
No, that is precisely what you should be saying! This is what the Church has always maintained, and essentially what Jesus implied: “It looks like bread, but it ain’t!”

I just clicked your name and saw that you are agnostic. That explains your questioning. Questioning is good. But at some point we all take that leap of faith and say “I choose to believe.” There are these little things called “miracles,” you know. There is no scientific explanation for miracles. The Eucharist is a miracle. The Greeks call it a “Mystery.” We don’t call it “belief” and “faith” for nothing. If it could be scientifically proven, it would be called “proof” instead.
 
Physical objects are defined by our senses. If something has all the observable properties of a thing, it is that thing by definition.

My point isn’t that there’s no miracle. It’s that if there’s anything miraculous, it’s not that the bread is something else-- it’s that the bread has special properties that normal bread doesn’t have-- like an attachment to the suffering, forgiveness, and other qualities of Jesus.

It’s still bread, though. 😃
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top