[no need to apologize…I greatly appreciate a response that demonstrates that you have either read the artilce that I earlier linked or that you have some familiarity with the scholars listed in it.
I read the article and have started reading some of the books mentioned in it.
I
believe that might be overstating the matter…
agreed, but I suspect that the need for the bishop has more to do with Ignatius’s desire to make the bishop the monarchical unifying force than it has to do with some theology of the Eucharist
Yes, unity was important but also quite possibly the desire not to leave it up to chance who was allowed to celebrate the Eucharist because it was too important. In the Didache we hear of wandering prophets who potenially celebrated the Eucharist in different churches. The problem the author of Didache had was that he didn’t seem to be thrilled about some of these wandering prophets b/c some where not apparently legit evidenced by the practical guidlines the author gave to separate these fakes out from the real ones. These prophets seem to have ceased by the 2 century to the more structured hiearchy Ignatius touches on.
agreed
yep, that article that I linked examines their views at parts 3 and 4…the minority who don’t see a real presence are discussed at part 5. One of the observations WRT Bradshaw reads:
Paul Bradshaw has written one of the latest attempts to refute the four-action Eucharistic theory of Dix. The thrust of his argument against Dix is that he believes the second century rite for the Eucharist to be very fluid and thus susceptible to influence from both Judaism and paganism. With regard to real presence, Bradshaw suddenly, all doubts are swept aside, sees it within the text of Ignatius. He never explains his view in a substantive manner.
Like the author of that article I see a “disconnect”. Bradshaw recognizes the diversity WRT the Eucharistic rite, but then doesn’t seem to take that diversity into account when assessing Ignatius’s view WRT a real presence. As indicated above, there was a great deal of diversity WRT Eucharistic views in the first centuries and a real bodily presence (RBP) was not accepted by Augustine (the scholars seem to be lining up pretty nicely for me on that issue…notwithstanding the protests of the pundits that we have heard from here). So what are we to believe? It just doesn’t seem credible that:
a) the apostles taught a real bodily presence in the Eucharist;
b) the Eucharist was the central point in worship;
c) notwithstanding (a) and (b), this RBP was abandoned by some and amended by others (all of whom remain within the body of orthodox believers) to create the observed diversity and to result in the absence of that teaching in 400 AD Carthage
with that in mind, we then ask, “Should we, like Bradshaw, jump to the conclusion that Ignatius held to a RBP?” Given the little that we have from Ignatius, given his tendency to wax metaphorically, given his usage of words similar to John’s (which, if John wasn’t speaking of a RBP, then we shouldn’t assume Ignatius was) and given that the diversity we see in the 2nd century would mitigate against the possibility of a clear RBP arising this early (though, I guess it could be a localized innovation), there seems to be good reasons not to jump to that conclusion. ]
I enjoyed the article regardless of not finding some of the author’s conclusions convincing. It was a nice summary. Ive just recently started studying this in greater depth and the paper gave a good background on the issue. I don’t see things like travel fatigue, passionate feelings and impending torture and death as potential support for the idea that Ignatius’s argument was invalid (if indeed he was speaking of real presence) and I don’t find accepting the idea that a real presence belief existed so early on to be contradictory to accepting the historical fact of doctrinal development. I dont think its fair to argue that one who argues for a realistic Ignatius “denies any view of doctrinal development”. Clearly scholars within the whole spectrum from real presence to purely symbolic accept the development of doctrine and don’t accept “an advanced pristine orthodoxy” this early in the church. I dont see accepting the idea that first or second century Christians understood a more than symbolic reality and concomitantly accepting the trinity doctrinal development that took hunreds of years to be finalized as necessarily being inconsistent.
Why should we accept that metaphorical language in one context rules out literal language in another context? Rather than seeing the polemical anti-docetist context of Ad Smyrnaeans 7.1 as reason not to take it literal because its polemical, can one not look at that as clarification instead?(I do think i understand Ferguson’s point on this).
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How odd.