Posted on 10/15/2013 2:24:21 PM PDT by Rusty0604
Father Ray Leonard, who serves as the Catholic chaplain at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay in Georgia, filed suit Monday against the Department of Defense, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the Department of the Navy, and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. DOD is prohibiting Father Leonard and the other Catholic priests from administering the sacraments and providing other services to their congregations even though two weeks ago Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, a law that instructed DOD to maintain on the job and keep paying contract employees who were supporting the troops. DOD took this action because Hagel determined--after consulting with Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department--that civilian Catholic priests, working under contract as chaplains, did not, among other things, “contribute to the morale” and “well-being” of service personnel.
Father Leonard, who spent a decade serving the Tibetan population in China, likened the administration’s behavior to that of the regime in the People’s Republic. “In China, I was disallowed from performing public religious services due to the lack of religious freedom in China,” Father Leonard said in a statement. "I never imagined that when I returned home to the United States, that I would be forbidden from practicing my religious beliefs as I am called to do, and would be forbidden from helping and serving my faith community.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
No, my FRiend, there is a mountain of "difference". And, for a moment consider...nowhere does the text indicate any of the "processes" the RCC has manufactured over the centuries to attempt this "literal" change. Notice, Jesus never said, "By the way, when this comes up after I am gone, you will need a special man (I'll designate him a priest) to have special bread baked and special wine set aside in a chalice. Then, at a moment, he must lift it up and say certain words over it for the actual transubstantiation to occur. Then, he must "administer" it to parishoners who line up and walk across the stage. This is what I mean by 'doing this in remembrance of me'."
Compare that to eating bread and drinking wine and saying, "I remember you Lord Jesus".
And, yes, there were many believers who saw this second understanding as the correct one. Paul and Peter, for example. Nowhere in Scripture do either of them refer to a "transubstantiation" ceremony. Your club made the whole thing up...and we invite you to abandon their chains and find rescue in Jesus, alone...if God permits you (Rom. 9).
What is not the point?
No, Jesus didn’t say all the things you seem to fancy would be necessary to justify the universal practice and understanding of Christians, both East and West, until Zwingli got it into his head that nothing really happens in the Eucharist. But He did tell us that the Holy Spirit would lead us into all truth.
So your position is that, at least as regards the Eucharist, somehow Our Lord’s promise concerning the Spirit, remained unfulfilled with all the generations of martrys under Roman and Persian persecution, all the faithful who sought to follow Christ down 15 centuries or so, getting the nature of the Eucharist wrong until the promise of the Holy Spirit guiding us into all truth was fulfilled in Zwingli judging that the command “do this in remembrance of me” somehow nullified all the Scriptural texts that point to the reality of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Really?
Or do you have some patristic evidence supporting a proto-Zwinglian position in the Apostolic era? I’ve certainly seen none, and I’ve read all the major writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. Had the view even been held by a substantial body of heretics, we’d have texts condemning it, but nothing... The post-communion prayer in the Didache speaks of the Eucharist as spiritual food and drink and connects it to eternal life. St. Ignatius of Antioch, who knew the Holy Apostles and according to his life as we read it in the Orthodox Church met Christ as a child, being in fact the child who was brought to Jesus and sat on His lap when He said “suffer the little children come unto me”, plainly holds the traditional understanding of the Eucharist as the very Body and Blood of Christ, and understands the taxis of the Church with its orders of ministry (read his Letter the Smyrneans).
There is no unbroken line of "popes" (read any real history not given to Rome's self-justifying propaganda), there is no purgatory, there is no indulgence, there is no mariolatry, there is no genuflecting, or pater-nosters or rosaries. This is all manufactured religion...and the errant folks think they will be heard for their many words.
Over the centuries, there have been a great body of folks slaughtered by Rome (I know, it was really the Spanish government inflicting the damage...at the command of Rome) to enforce compliance. They did not agree, but they did not publish books. Don't point at the Roman & Persian persecutions without noting the purgings completed by your group. And, many of those who claimed to be free from Rome after the Reformation turned and killed Catholics...this too is wrong. But, proves nothing. If numbers and important folks are your guide then we'll be looking for you at a mosque soon.
Continue to rely upon the so-called "fathers" for the self-proving excuses to hold on to the error. The truth is, "What do the Scriptures teach?". And, the Romanist view is not there. Sorry. But, we invite you to leave their chains and find hope in Jesus, alone...if He allows you to come to Him (John 6).
Sorry, but among the people “slaughtered by Rome” — if you want to attribute the acts of Latin Christian governments like the Spanish in the wake of the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain to the Latin church — are a lot of *my* co-religionists: the Orthodox Christians who died when the Fourth Crusade forcibly installed a Latin Emperor at Constantinople, the Orthodox who died fighting the Teutonic Knights, or resisting the Unia when the Poles controlled the Ukraine. I can quote the Fathers against Rome: the plain meaning of many canons of the Ecumenical Councils renders absurd the Latin contention of universal ordinary jurisdiction for the Bishop of Rome, as does the plain meaning of the passage in St. Ignatius’s Letter to the Smyrnaeans which first applies the adjective “katholike” to the Church. We Orthodox number among the Fathers, St. Mark of Ephesus who condemned the Latin innovation of purgatory most eloquently in his “Against the Latin Chapters Concerning Purgatorial Fire.”
Stick to the topic: the reality of the Eucharist is not an “invention” of “Rome,” but a nearly universal Christian belief until Zwingli. Those who denied it prior to Zwingli were limited to the gnostic heretics who denied the Incarnation because they held the idea that matter is evil and the iconoclasts who had trouble with the reality of the Incarnation in that they would not admit that it is possible to depict the Incarnate Son and Word of God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, depictibility being part of our human nature which He assumed in all things excepting sin alone. You seem to think that only “Rome”, which you want to vilify, believes that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ, ignoring us Orthodox (and the Copts and Armenians and Assyrians and Lutherans and Calvinists until the last started following Zwingli).
Plain text of Scripture? Equating works of the Law with the Mysteries of the Church? You’re the one who is stretching the meaning there. And I’d be careful: what you call “hocus pocus” is, according to the teaching of the Holy Orthodox Church the action of the Holy Spirit. We Orthodox fault the Latins’ eucharistic rites since the abandonment of the Gallican rite in favor of the Tridentine for not making this explicit in an epiclesis.
It is your argument that ignores the plain text of the Scriptures: “This is my body,” “Drink ye all of it, this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins,” “Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.”
And most tellingly, you ignore and set at naught the plain meaning of Our Lord’s words: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me. This is that bread which came down from heaven: not as your fathers did eat manna, and are dead: he that eateth of this bread shall live for ever.”
How, pray tell, are we to eat His flesh and drink His blood as He tells us to, since He has ascended into Heaven, if the Eucharist is not really His body and blood? According to you, neither of us has any life in us since, according to you neither of us has eaten His flesh nor drunk His blood. Nor can we, in which case this is a very silly discussion and we might as well all become “eat drink and be merry for tomorrow we die” pagans.
Another battle in obamas war against Catholics and all Christians for that matter
Lest you wander away and attempt to dazzle us with your historical polemics, the plain text of Jesus' words do not allow for any transubstantiation. Do you actually believe (please be honest here), that Jesus transubstantiated the bread and wine into His own body and blood? Before the cross? Any reasonable reader can tell He is signaling what is about to happen. The prophetic words of the Lord are to tell the disciples, this is "it". "You must allow my death to be the price for your lack of righteousness."
Notice, Paul does not provide for much discussion in His epistles about taking bread and wine (I Cor.11), but an enormous amount of space explaining grace as a free gift given to those whom God has elect. Read Rom. Gal. Eph. Col. Heb. This fact escapes Orthodox and Romanists alike. They cannot allow God to actually be God, but must place man in the center of their "religiion". There is no such thing in the New Covenant (Jer. 31:31ff). Read the text. God will decide (Rom 9), God will then choose, God will then elect, God will then rescue without fail (John 6).
Your preoccupation with the Lord's Supper is indicative of a very nice religious man. That is, however, not the Gospel. We, "...who are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, that you may obey Jesus and be sprinkled with His blood...who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope..." And, Peter goes on to provide the promises granted. Notice, we were chosen in order that we may obey. There is where we (and likely you) have "eaten" His flesh and drunk His blood. Not during a ceremony, but during your rescue...if you are among the elect.
And, your quote is actually from Solomon.
You keep arguing against Latin doctrines. Transubstantiation is an attempt to give a rational Aristotelian explanation for the incomprehensible action of the Holy Spirit. We Orthodox don’t use the word because we don’t think you can stuff God or His actions into Aristotelian categories (actually the inapplicability of all binary distinctions and created categories to God has been one of the touchstones of Orthodox theology since at least the Cappadocian Fathers, and maybe earlier depending on how you date “On the Divine Names” traditionally attributed to St. Dionysius the Areopagite.) We tried John Italus for heresy for trying to explain the Eucharist in Aristotelian terms — though he got his teaching job back when he recanted, unlike what the Latins did to Galileo when they tried him for denying Aristotle’s cosmology and locked him up in straight prison after he recanted.
I suspect further discussion is rather pointless. I read the Scriptures in the hermeneutic tradition of the Orthodox Church which (on this point in agreement with the Latins, Copts, Assyrians, Lutherans and pre-Zwingli Calvinists) takes Our Lord’s words in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John as one of the parts of Scripture to be taken literally. You read the Scriptures in a hermeneutic tradition that seems to be shaped largely by drawing contradistinctions between your position and that embraced by the Popes of Rome, and reads those passages in a metaphorical or spiritualized sense, then goes to great trouble to stretch the meaning of other parts of Scripture to explain not taking Our Lord’s words in the sixth chapter of John literally. Neither of us will convince the other to abandon their hermeneutics, so further posts are really pointless.
If you regard FR threads as verbal duels, you are welcomed to reply one last time, but I will not answer.
May God bless you and the Holy Spirit indeed lead you into all truth.
If you regard FR threads as verbal duels, you are welcome to dismiss the plain text of the Scriptures in favor of your “tradition”. That is a common response to those who need religion.
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