SPLIT:The Real Presence

[Bishopite]

Bish-

Don’t forget this notable quotable nugget from JNDK:

J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, San Francisco:Harper & Row, 1978, 447, provides this statement on the heels of Augustine’s Ennar 98:

• One could multiply texts like these which show Augustine taking for granted the traditional identification of the elements with the sacred body and blood. There can be no doubt that he [Augustine] shared the realism held by almost all of his contemporaries and predecessors.

J.N.D. Kelly was a Protestant, I don’t expect him to agree with Catholic dogma. I simply used a quote from his book to show “evidence” that non-Catholic Christian scholars disagree with your subjective inductive interpretations of the patristics.

 

[Bishopite]

I’m not sure exactly what Augustine understood, but it was sure a heck of a lot more than crackers and grape juice.

I’m sure Sola Scriptura could subjectively define for us what “crackers” and “grape juice” means?

 

[Bishopite]

Bishopite-

Previously I posted:

1. Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., rev. by Robert T. Handy, NY: Scribners, 1970, 90-91:

• By the middle of the 2nd century, the conception of a real presence of Christ in the Supper was wide-spread . . . The essentials of the ‘Catholic’ view were already at hand by 253.
  Help me out here…Augustine lived when?

Well, let’s see, he was at the council of Nicea held in 325 by Catholic Bishops…so that means that he lived in the fourth century, right?
So, just for arguments sake, 325 minus 253 equals 72 years prior. Huh, now that’s strange. : )

 

[Bishopite]

Well, let’s see, he was at the council of Nicea held in 325 by Catholic Bishops…so that means that he lived in the fourth century, right?
So, just for arguments sake, 325 minus 253 equals 72 years prior. Huh, now that’s strange. : )

Correction. Augustine wasn’t at the council of Nicea, Athanasius was, however, Augustine lived in the fourth century. I was wrong…sorry

 

[SolaScriptura]

From an article by Dave Armstrong in Envoy Magazine:

envoymagazine.com/backissues/4.1/god.htm

I’m not sure exactly what Augustine understood, but it was sure a heck of a lot more than crackers and grape juice.

Out.

Yes, he did believe it was more than “crackers and grape juice”, but that was not the issue. The issue is did he believe the bread and wine was changed into Christ’s body and blood. This answer to this question is categorically no. So Augustine was not a Roman Catholic in his views and he was not the typical baptist in his views. Augustine views were more in line with the views of John Calvin and those of the Reformation who also affirm non-physical real presence. This has been my claim all alone, glad to see you are finally coming to that conclusion

 

[SolaScriptura]

J.N.D. Kelly was a Protestant, I don’t expect him to agree with Catholic dogma. I simply used a quote from his book to show “evidence” that non-Catholic Christian scholars disagree with your subjective inductive interpretations of the patristics.

Actually J.N.D. Kelly agrees with everything I said. It is only by reading him out of context do you come to a different conclusion. Are you sure you have the book and you have read it?

 

[SolaScriptura]

You certainly have the right to believe what you will, however the patristic quotes given are just a sample of the many and are straight forward statements like it or not…real means actual.
I am really typing, physically typing right now. Jesus said in John 6, My flesh is “real” flesh, my blood “real” drink. Perhaps you are going to tell Randy and me what the definition of “IS” is?

Yeah, and God is really present everywhere since He is omnipresent, but does that mean you eat Him when you are eating any food? Jesus is really the door to heaven does that mean He has hinges and knob? Believers are really sheep and Jesus is really the shepherd. Do believers have four legs and are they covered with white wool?

 

[Mannyfit75]

Yeah, and God is really present everywhere since He is omnipresent, but does that mean you eat Him when you are eating any food? Jesus is really the door to heaven does that mean He has hinges and knob? Believers are really sheep and Jesus is really the shepherd. Do believers have four legs and are they covered with white wool?

Those arguments have been used by Protestant Apologists before which is just trying to avoid the REAL PRESENCE of Jesus Christ.

In the Gospels Jesus is referred too as the sheperd of his flock. This said symbolically. It’s clearly so that his Apostles are to shepard his flock since like sheep, we have the tendency to stray away.

Jesus explain his parables.

In John 6, the Bread Discourse, Jesus insist that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood. He said it is real food and real drink (My flesh is true food and my blood is true blood). Paul in his letters to the Corinthians warm them that some have ate and drink the Body and Blood of the Lord and became sick because they received it unworthily.

This is not ordinary bread. This is truly the Flesh of the Son of Man and his Blood. Real Presence in the Eucharist is early belief.

Transtantiation was only defined just as the Christ’s Church defined Trinity. We did not come up with the word Trinity until 325 A.D, so should we throw that doctrine away? No. Not at all.

The refusal of real presence by you, or any Protestants is simple. You deny the authority of the Catholic Church, which is the Only Church Jesus founded. By denying his Church, you deny Christ. He founded a Church and the Church says, it is the Lord’s Body and Blood.

You don’t agree. I don’t think the Holy Spirit teaches contradictory doctrines especially concerning basic Christian faith. Some of the ECF may disagree on the issue but the Church as a whole settle the matter like they did when they defined the Trinity, and form the Canon of Scripture (the way we see the Bible see it today, like the Council of Rome (382 A.D, Council of Hippo 392 A.D, and Council of Carthage 396 A.D).

 

[SolaScriptura]

Those arguments have been used by Protestant Apologists before which is just trying to avoid the REAL PRESENCE of Jesus Christ.

Who is denying the REAL PRESENCE? Have you read the above post? I’m denying a physical presence not a real presence.

 

[SolaScriptura]

Several posts ago, I reserved the right to clarify my thoughts concerning “sacramental” versus “physical” presence. I recently came across something by Patrick Madrid in Envoy magazine that addresses this quite nicely.

Isn’t this interesting. You are constantly trying to chide Protestants about their view and you don’t even understand what your own view is.

Now you have read an article by Patrick Madrid that clarifies the issue for you. So please answer a few questions for me.

1. 
   *]Is Patrick Madrid a part of the teaching magisterium that clears up theological issue for you?
   
   *]Could you now succinctly explain the difference between a physical presence and a sacramental presence?

 

[puzzleannie]

Tell me Randy, is there a distinction between a Real Presence and a Physical Presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper?

yes there is, Christ is sacramentally substantially present in the Eucharistic species, he is not physically present. for the distinction please search on transubstantiation, which is the only term that when explained properly will make the necessary distinctions. Real Presence is a very elastic term which is used by different people to mean different things.

 

[Mickey]

Ladies and gentlemen this is the point I have been making all along.

Another example of Randy and his internet sources making the same mistake I tried to warn him against

You see, I knew you would make all these mistakes, because they are made all the time by Catholic apologists.

**Ego is a terrible thing! **

A man who craves esteem cannot be rid of the causes of grief. (St Isaac of Syria)

 

[Mickey]

Augustine views were more in line with the views of John Calvin and those of the Reformation

smileys.smileycentral.com/cat/36/36_11_6.gif

 

[SolaScriptura]

**Ego is a terrible thing! **

A man who craves esteem cannot be rid of the causes of grief. (St Isaac of Syria)

Not ego, but frustration. I get frustrated by those who talk as if they are so certain about things and chide Protestants when they don’t know what they are talking about. However, I should n’t let ego or frustration get the best of me. I ask the forgiveness of those who I have offended by my unnecessarily harsh words. By God’s grace I will do better.

 

[Mickey]

I should n’t let ego or frustration get the best of me. I ask the forgiveness of those who I have offended by my unnecessarily harsh words. By God’s grace I will do better.

May the peace and love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ be with you always.
smileys.smileycentral.com/cat/983.gif

 

[Randy_Carson]

DAVE ARMSTRONG RESPONDS

Yesterday, I posted a lengthy quotation from an article by Dave Armstrong on St. Augustine’s Belief in the Real Presence.

Sola Scriptura reacted strongly to this article, so last night, I clipped posting #31 in its entirety from Sola Scriptura and emailed it directly to Dave Armstrong and asked for his thoughts on Mr. Scriptura’s “rebuttal”.

Although Dave does not participate in forum debates these days, he graciously gave me permission to post two responses in this forum. Enjoy.

Hi Randy,

I think you’ve already amply refuted your opponent. He’s just repeating himself now and spinning his wheels. St. Augustine believed in a simultaneous symbolism and realism, side-by-side, as I have explained in my papers: like the “sign of Jonah” also being real, literal, and physical: the Resurrection. It’s “both/and.” The Protestant scholars agree, though Kelly (showing his natural bias a bit) stresses the symbolism part too much, over against Augustine’s realism. Yet he doesn’t deny that Augustine was a realist, which means “real, physical” (not just “spiritual”) presence. But your opponent won’t accept that. He wants to torture all the quotes into symbolism only. It can’t be done. He won’t change his mind. You’ve done all that anyone could do. It’s proven from Protestant scholars themselves:
About St. Augustine in particular, Kelly concludes:

. . . There are certainly passages in his writings which give a superficial justification to all these interpretations, but a balanced verdict must agree that he accepted the current realism . . . One could multiply texts . . . which show Augustine taking for granted the traditional identification of the elements with the sacred body and blood. There can be no doubt that he shared the realism held by almost all his contemporaries and predecessors.
(Ibid., 446-447)

Likewise, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church makes the same point about allusions to “symbolism” with regard to the general teaching of the Church Fathers:

Even where the elements were spoken of as ‘symbols’ or ‘antitypes’ there was no intention of denying the reality of the Presence in the gifts.
(Ibid., 475) [Context shows that by “Presence” the author means literal body and blood, not Calvin’s convoluted, twist-like-a-wax-nose “spiritual presence”]

The problem is his “either/or” mentality. That’s why facts (even if presented by Protestant scholars – you provided nine from my materials) are ineffectual to get him to see what Augustine believed. He can’t comprehend Augustine’s dual “both/and” view because his premises don’t and won’t allow him to do so. We can accept both sides of the equation but he can only accept one, and so has to pretend the other doesn’t exist, or explain it away by special pleading. He can’t simply follow the facts of patristic beliefs to where they clearly lead. He’ll keep asking questions forever. But that doesn’t mean he has prevailed in the debate. He has already lost whether he is aware of it or not. But he’ll keep questioning as if the game hasn’t already been lost. Happens all the time! He has set himself up as the “answer man” and so he won’t admit that he is wrong. It’s what is called obscurantism or obfuscation (or worse: sophism). You’ve provided all that is necessary to prove your point.

 

[Randy_Carson]

DAVE ARMSTRONG RESPONDS WITH ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

Hi Randy,

I was thinking about this, and wanted to add that one must also look at the corresponding view of the Fathers on the sacrifice of the mass.

Kelly writes about this:
It was natural for early Christians to think of the eucharist as a sacrifice. The fulfillment of prophecy demanded a solemn Christian offering, and the rite itself was wrapped in the sacrificial atmosphere with which our Lord invested the Last Supper. The words of institution, ‘Do this’ (touto poieite), must have been charged with sacrificial overtones for second-century ears; Justin at any rate understood 1 apol. 66,3; cf.* dial*. 41,1] them to mean, ‘Offer this.’ . . . Justin . . . makes it plain Dial. 41,3] that the bread and the wine themselves were the ‘pure offering’ foretold by Malachi . . . he uses 1 apol. 65,3-5] the term ‘thanksgiving’ as technically equivalent to ‘the eucharistized bread and wine’. The bread and wine, moreover, are offered ‘for a memorial (eis anamnasin) of the passion,’ a phrase which in view of his identification of them with the Lord’s body and blood implies much more than an act of purely spiritual recollection. Altogether it would seem that, while his language is not fully explicit, Justin is feeling his way to the conception of the eucharist as the offering of the Saviour’s passion.
(J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, San Francisco: HarperCollins, revised edition, 1978, 196–197)

1913 Catholic Encyclopedia: “Sacrifice of the Mass”:
For Augustine nothing is more certain than that every religion, whether true or false, must have an exterior form of celebration and worship (Contra Faust., xix, 11). This applies as well to Christians (l. c., xx, 18), who “commemorate the sacrifice consummated (on the cross) by the holiest oblation and participation of the Body and Blood of Christ” (celebrant sacrosancta oblatione et participatione corporis et sanguinis Christi). The Mass is, in his eyes (De Civ. Dei, X, 20), the “highest and true sacrifice” (summum verumque sacrificium), Christ being at once “priest and victim” (ipse offerens, ipse et oblatio) and he reminds the Jews (Adv. Jud, ix, 13) that the sacrifice of Malachias is now made in every place (in omni loco offerri sacrificium Christianorum). He relates of his mother Monica (Confess., ix, 13) that she had asked for prayers at the altar (ad altare) for her soul and had attended Mass daily. From Augustine onwards the current of the Church’s tradition flows smoothly along in a well-ordered channel, without check or disturbance, through the Middle Ages to our own time. Even the powerful attempt made to stem it through the Reformation had no effect.
So both transubstantiation and adoration are clearly present among the Fathers, even according to a prominent Protestant historian who completely disagrees personally with these doctrines. Calvin is simply in error. Schaff then takes up the subject of the Sacrifice of the Mass in his next section (§ 96. “The Sacrifice of the Eucharist”), and we find no absence there, either, contra Calvin’s dogmatic pontifications (pp. 503-508, 510):
The Catholic church, both Greek and Latin, sees in the Eucharist not only a sacramentum, in which God communicates a grace to believers, but at the same time, and in fact mainly, a sacrificium, in which believers really offer to God that which is represented by the sensible elements. For this view also the church fathers laid the foundation, and it must be conceded they stand in general far more on the Greek and Roman Catholic than on the Protestant side of this question.
. . . In this view certainly, in a deep symbolical and ethical sense, Christ is offered to God the Father in every believing prayer, and above all in the holy Supper; i.e. as the sole ground of our reconciliation and acceptance . . .

But this idea in process of time became adulterated with foreign elements, and transformed into the Graeco-Roman doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass. According to this doctrine the Eucharist is an unbloody repetition of the atoning sacrifice of Christ by the priesthood for the salvation of the living and the dead; so that the body of Christ is truly and literally offered every day and every hour, and upon innumerable altars at the same time. The term mass, which properly denoted the dismissal of the congregation (missio, dismissio) at the close of the general public worship, became, after the end of the fourth century, the name for the worship of the faithful, which consisted in the celebration of the eucharistic sacrifice and the communion.
(cont.)

 

[Randy_Carson]

. . . We pass now to the more particular history. The ante-Nicene fathers uniformly conceived the Eucharist as a thank-offering of the church; the congregation offering the consecrated elements of bread and wine, and in them itself, to God. This view is in itself perfectly innocent, but readily leads to the doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass, as soon as the elements become identified with the body and blood of Christ, and the presence of the body comes to be materialistically taken. The germs of the Roman doctrine appear in Cyprian about the middle of the third century, in connection with his high-churchly doctrine of the clerical priesthood. Sacerdotium and sacrificium are with him correlative ideas,

. . . The doctrine of the sacrifice of the mass is much further developed in the Nicene and post-Nicene fathers, though amidst many obscurities and rhetorical extravagances, and with much wavering between symbolical and grossly realistic conceptions, until in all essential points it is brought to its settlement by Gregory the Great at the close of the sixth century.

1. It is not a new sacrifice added to that of the cross, but a daily, unbloody repetition and perpetual application of that one only sacrifice. Augustine represents it, on the one hand, as a sacramentum memoriae, a symbolical commemoration of the sacrificial death of Christ; to which of course there is no objection. But, on the other hand, he calls the celebration of the communion verissimum sacrificium of the body of Christ. The church, he says, offers (immolat) to God the sacrifice of thanks in the body of Christ, from the days of the apostles through the sure succession of the bishops down to our time. But the church at the same time offers, with Christ, herself, as the body of Christ, to God. As all are one body, so also all are together the same sacrifice. According to Chrysostom the same Christ, and the whole Christ, is everywhere offered. It is not a different sacrifice from that which the High Priest formerly offered, but we offer always the same sacrifice, or rather, we perform a memorial of this sacrifice. This last clause would decidedly favor a symbolical conception, if Chrysostom in other places had not used such strong expressions as this: “When thou seest the Lord slain, and lying there, and the priest standing at the sacrifice,” or: “Christ lies slain upon the altar.”
2. The sacrifice is the anti-type of the Mosaic sacrifice, and is related to it as substance to typical shadows. It is also especially foreshadowed by Melchizedek’s unbloody offering of bread and wine. The sacrifice of Melchizedek is therefore made of great account by Hilary, Jerome, Augustine, Chrysostom, and other church fathers, on the strength of the well-known parallel in the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

. . . Cyril of Jerusalem, in his fifth and last mystagogic Catechesis, which is devoted to the consideration of the eucharistic sacrifice and the liturgical service of God, gives the following description of the eucharistic intercessions for the departed:

When the spiritual sacrifice, the unbloody service of God, is performed, we pray to God over this atoning sacrifice for the universal peace of the church, for the welfare of the world, for the emperor, for soldiers and prisoners, for the sick and afflicted, for all the poor and needy. Then we commemorate also those who sleep, the patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs, that God through their prayers and their intercessions may receive our prayer; and in general we pray for all who have gone from us, since we believe that it is of the greatest help to those souls for whom the prayer is offered, while the holy sacrifice, exciting a holy awe, lies before us.
This is clearly an approach to the later idea of purgatory in the Latin church. Even St. Augustine, with Tertullian, teaches plainly, as an old tradition, that the eucharistic sacrifice, the intercessions or suffragia and alms, of the living are of benefit to the departed believers, so that the Lord deals more mercifully with them than their sins deserve.
/INDENT​

 

[Randy_Carson]

From: F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, editors, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford Univ. Press, 2nd ed., 1983, pp.476, 1221:
It was also widely held from the first that the Eucharist is in some sense a sacrifice, though here again definition was gradual . . . In early post-NT times the constant repudiation of carnal sacrifice and emphasis on life and prayer at Christian worship did not hinder the Eucharist from being described as a sacrifice from the first. . .

From early times the Eucharistic offering was called a sacrifice in virtue of its immediate relation to the sacrifice of Christ.
From: Jaroslav Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971, 146-147:
By the date of the Didache [anywhere from about 60 to 160, depending on the scholar]. . . the application of the term ‘sacrifice’ to the Eucharist seems to have been quite natural, together with the identification of the Christian Eucharist as the ‘pure offering’ commanded in Malachi 1:11 . . .

The Christian liturgies were already using similar language about the offering of the prayers, the gifts, and the lives of the worshipers, and probably also about the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, so that the sacrificial interpretation of the death of Christ never lacked a liturgical frame of reference . . .
The Protestant who wishes to keep denying all of this massive evidence not only has to special plead with regard to the real, physical, substantial eucharistic presence, but also with regard to the sacrifice of the mass and the motif of eucharistic adoration: both of which are abominations to John Calvin and his prodigy, along with substantial presence. It’s one thing for a person today or in the 16th century to hold these heretical, unbiblical beliefs; quite another to revise history and maintain a ridiculous pretense that the Church fathers en masse did also. It’s simply impossible.

In Him,

Dave

 

[Mannyfit75]

Who is denying the REAL PRESENCE? Have you read the above post? I’m denying a physical presence not a real presence.

I see. In a physical sense it isn’t physical the flesh (physically flesh) in appearance. Jesus however is truly present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Eucharist.