E
elvisman
Guest
**You REALLY shouldn’t Quote St. Augustine if you don’t understand what he is saying. He was one of the mose vehement believers in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist - but his writings go high above the heads of most people, so don’**t feel too bad:Also, many RC on here like to link to the early church fathers for theology. What about what St. Augustine wrote about the Eucharist?
“If the sentence is one of command, either forbidding a crime or vice, or enjoining an act of prudence or benevolence, it is not figurative. If, however, it seems to enjoin a crime or vice, or to forbid an act of prudence or benevolence, it is figurative. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man,” says Christ, “and drink His blood, ye have no life in you.” This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should have a share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, III).
Augustine
**"I promised you [new Christians], who have now been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the sacrament of the Lord’s table, which you now look upon and of which you last night were made participants. You ought to know that you have received what you are going to receive, and what you ought to receive daily. That bread which you see on the altar having been sanctified by the word of God is the body of Christ, That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ"(Sermons 227 [A.D. 411]).
"What you see is the bread and the chalice, that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. This has been said very briefly, which may perhaps be sufficient for faith, yet faith does not desire instruction" (ibid. 272).
Oh, and, ummm . . . the REST of the Church Fathers are UNANIMOUS about the Real Presence - so were many of the so-called "Reformers" . . .
“Who**, but the devil, has granted such license of wresting the words of the holy Scripture? Who ever read in the Scriptures, that my body is the same as the sign of my body? or, that is is the same as it signifies? What language in the world ever spoke so? It is only then the devil, that imposes upon us by these fanatical men. Not one of the Fathers of the Church, though so numerous, ever spoke as the Sacramentarians: not one of them ever said, It is only bread and wine; or, the body and blood of Christ is not there present.”**
- Martin Luther on the Real Presence