Replies

Did you eat His flesh or did you a biscuit with the magic wand waived over it? Did Jesus turn into a door? Did you see Him become a gate? You may wish to invest in a good course on hermeneutics, my FRiend. “Do this in remembrance of Me.” not “Do this and believe that my flesh has become the biscuit.” Reading is your friend.

So you do have a hermeneutic tradition you adhere to that tells you to read "Do this in remembrance of me" literally (evidently with the word "only" inserted between "in" and "remembrance", despite no justification for this in the Greek original), but to read as metaphorical, "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," and "Take eat, this is my body," "Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins," and St. Paul's admonition, "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".

You do realize that, except for gnostics and iconoclastic heretics (two groups that had trouble with the reality of the Incarnation), no Christian of any note prior to Zwingli denied the reality of the Eucharist as Christ's very Body and Blood? Not the Latins (you call them "Catholics", why do you do that? do you credit their claim to be the universal Church?), not us Orthodox, not the monophysites (Copts, Syrian Jacobites and Armenians) not the Nestorians (Assyrians), not the first generations of Lutherans, not Calvin and those of his followers who didn't adopt Zwingli's views. We might quibble over whether the Latins' use of Aristotelian categories to describe the miracle is appropriate (we Orthodox don't like applying Aristotelianism to matters of the Faith, and the Copts and Assyrians aren't wild about it either), we might quarrel with the Latins and Armenians over their use of azymes in place of artos for the Eucharistic bread, but we all agree that Jesus should be taken at His word at face value when He instituted the Eucharist.

You do realize that there is no contradiction between celebrating the Eucharist in remembrance of Christ (the anamnesis is a part of every traditional Eucharistic rite East or West) and when this is done the Holy Spirit making the elements of bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ so we can literally fulfill His command that we eat His Flesh and drink His Blood that we might have Him and the Father abiding in us, and might have life.

To believe otherwise you need to insert a non-existent "only" into the passage you quote against the vast majority of Christian believers, and read large swaths of Scripture non-literally.

Do this and believe that my flesh has become the biscuit.” Reading is your friend.

John 6:56: Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.

Luke 22:19: ..."This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me."