So now you disclaim volition? You made no decision to become a Christian? You just woke up one day and you *were* one?
rather than seeking what part of the faith to amputate
Here you attribute motive where you have no evidence of the same. As we have discussed before, every Scripture you have presented as an alleged proof text for a uniquely Roman Catholic doctrine is able to be read under normal Protestant interpretation. No amputation is necessary, nor is any such thing desired. You wrong us to say we have such evil intent. I promise you we do not.
For example, regarding the Eucharist, no human authority, other than ordinary God-given reason, is necessary to read a word in its ordinary meaning and context. The passage you cite does not occur in a vacuum. but on the heels of miraculously feeding the multitudes. It is in that setting that Jesus begins to redirect their attention from mere physical food to spiritual food, by the most striking and seemingly impossible language:
John 6:53 Then Jesus said to them, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.
How do we know this is spiritual food and NOT corporeal? Because Jesus, the only authority needed for this question, clearly says so:
John 6:63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.
This teaching, directly from the inspired word of God, is contrary to the bizarre and late-appearing novelty doctrine of transubstantiation. To accept transubstantiation is to amputate the logical exclusion Jesus is creating here, as he not only says he should be understood spiritually, but He specifically excludes corporeality as part of the answer. So there can be no clever synthesis, not part spiritual and part corporeal, no Aristotelian game of accidents and substance, both of which are mere excuses for retaining corporeality where Jesus specifically excluded it.
How then could this be done, this eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ, if not in some corporeal way? This is exactly the same point of confusion experienced by His audience in those moments when he first said these words. Yet this confusion is inexcusable, because Jesus had already established how, by spiritual means, we may find life in him:
John 6:47 Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.
Could it really be that simple? Believing in Him? Impossible. There must be something more to it. Yet coming to belief in Jesus is no small thing, for earlier in the same passage, Jesus has said it is not possible to believe in Him without being drawn to Him by God Himself:
John 6:44-45 No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, 'AND THEY SHALL ALL BE TAUGHT BY GOD.' Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.
But what about when He says, This is my body, this is my blood? (Matthew 26:26,28 et al). Again, no greater authority is needed than the common sense God gave us all:
Joh 10:9 I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
When Jesus says he is the door, does he invoke Aristotelian categories of accidence and substance? Or would any ordinary reader understand his words as figurative? Wouldn’t throwing transubstantiation in here be ludicrous? Yes, it would. Just as it would be in Matthew 26:26 & 28.
Instead, it now becomes clear that “eime”, the verb of being (“to be”), can have legitimate figurative use, which no less an authority that Jesus Himself has demonstrated by example.
For another excellent example, look at Matthew 13:38:
“The field (’agros’) is (’estin’) the world (’kosmos’); the good seed are the children of the kingdom; but the tares are the children of the wicked one;”
Estin is the same word (“to be”) in the same form (“is”) as the passage in Matthew 26:26 & 28.
This is a particularly good case, because it is impossible to take the subject of the analogy as literal; it is a parable, by definition establishing a figurative or symbolic relationship between the analogue and the underlying reality it describes.
To put a finer point on it, Jesus cannot here be teaching that one literal farmer’s field really is the entirety of the world. The farm field can only be a representation because it lacks all the literal the attributes of the kosmos as a whole. It is merely a tool used to teach the disciples about the spiritual dimension to Gospel evangelism. Jesus selected a part of the kosmos to represent the whole, and said part was chosen for its ability to teach, not because it had some Dr. Who Tardis-like capacity to fully contain the reality of the kosmos.
And various key fathers also testify to this figurative sense:
But at the present time, after that the proof of our liberty has shone forth so clearly in the resurrection of our Lord, we are not oppressed with the heavy burden of attending even to those signs which we now understand, but our Lord Himself, and apostolic practice, have handed down to us a few rites in place of many, and these at once very easy to perform, most majestic in their significance, and most sacred in the observance; such, for example, as the sacrament of baptism, and the celebration of the body and blood of the Lord. And as soon as any one looks upon these observances he knows to what they refer, and so reveres them not in carnal bondage, but in spiritual freedom. Now, as to follow the letter, and to take signs for the things that are signified by them, is a mark of weakness and bondage; so to interpret signs wrongly is the result of being misled by error.
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book III, Chapter 9.
See http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/12023.htm for full context.
Is Augustine a teacher of death? Should you also run away from him? But what does he say it is to confuse the sign for the thing it signifies? Weakness.
Then, having taken the bread and given it to His disciples, He made it His own body, by saying, “This is my body,” that is, the figure of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been, unless there were first a veritable body. An empty thing, or phantom, is incapable of a figure.Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book IV, Chapter 40
See http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/03124.htm for full context
Is Tertullian outside the camp as well? I should hope not. And there are many others. But it is late and I have to wrap this up for now.
So I’m asking you, with all sincerity, please reconsider your position. Protestants came by this figurative sense of the Eucharist honestly, from ancient and reliable sources. We didn’t invent it, and we were definitely not the first to have this understanding concerning the Eucharist. Its figurative quality emerges very naturally from the teaching of Jesus Himself, our mutually agreed highest authority, and does not at all diminish what He has done for us, but rather magnifies it to the greatest glory.
It grieves me to think we have so much in common, and yet must part ways on this, all because Trent anathematized dissent from the Aristotelian alchemy of Aquinas, a formulation that has no basis in Scripture, nor in any of the early fathers, but is actually refuted by the same. Real sigh …
Last part first, I became Christian when I received baptism; I was about one year of age. Of course as an adult I took a conscious and considered decision to seek full Communion with the Holy Catholic Church; I spent about a year sitting in church, like a good sheep, and another half a year in various forms and stages of Catechism. Christ once compared faith to a seed becoming a tree, and that is exactly was was happening since baptism and, glory be to God, will continue to happen till God takes me.
you attribute motive where you have no evidence of the same. [...] You wrong us to say we have such evil intent.
Surely, I cannot speak to everyone's intent, and indeed I gave my advice conditionally: "If any Protestant". But the pattern is common to all Protestantism. On fundamentals of faith: the nature of the Eucharist, the structure of the Church, the role of acquired virtue in salvation, -- we take the scripture on its direct face value. Christ said "this is my body" so we believe it is His body. Christ next said "do it", so we have priests who "do it". Christ said: "thou art Rock and I will build my Church on thee" and we have the papacy; the apostle said "you are not saved on faith alone" and we anathemize the view that we are saved by faith alone. Christ said "forgive them their sins" and we have confessions to priests. That is when it is written, we read what is written. It would be good for the Protestants to worry less what the Catholics do that is outside of the scope of the scripture and instead turn to their own errors that are firmly in contradiction to the scripture.
Jesus begins to redirect their attention from mere physical food to spiritual food
First, I am sure we agree that (1) the food of the miracle of the fishes and loaves was physical food; (2) the body of Christ that was on the Cross and ascended is physical body; that (3) the entirety of Christian religion pertains to matters spiritual; faith for example is a spiritual phenomenon; that finally (4) we live in the world that is both spiritual and physical. I say these rather evident things because you say "Christ redirects". That is a false dichotomy. The loaves were physical but built the spirit; Christ was incarnate but built the spirit. So if you mean to tell me that the Eucharist is spiritual and therefore is not the real body of Christ you are building a non-sequitur. The argument is not about that, but about the real presence of Christ with the body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist, which is to our taste and to our laboratory equipment is bread and wine, and is physically eaten and drunken as bread and wine would be, and then has a spiritual effect on us.
In that light, let us examine the Miracle of the Loaves. They ate physical food and were satisfied, and despite the satisfaction gathered up the remnants, because -- I don't see another reason, -- they revered them as miraculous. When there is a miracle, there is spirit working the miracle. Further, a physical object limited to one lunch basket became available to great many people. From that it follows that Christ worked the miracle of the loaves not to teach a contrast to the Eucharist, but rather in order to prepare for this difficult concept of one His body being in the mouths of great many. A contrast is drawn in the discourse, but not with the Loaves and Fishes; the contrast is with the manna from heaven and by extension the non-salvific nature of Jewish faith.
In general, the parables and miracles of Christ were given in order to teach and to prepare; not in order to foster an error and then correct that error. He means what He says. If Christ wanted to teach Protestant concept of Eucharist as a symbol and eating it as a metaphor of ingesting faith he would not give people real loaves and then spend the rest of the chapter speaking of "food indeed", and cause apostasy of some, who "walked no more with Him" over it.
the logical exclusion Jesus is creating here, as he not only says he should be understood spiritually, but He specifically excludes corporeality as part of the answer
This is not an exclusion but a clarification: the food in the baskets was physical food from which your stomach profited; the Eucharist is physical food from which your spirit profits, and the stomach does not profit. Compare in 1 Corinthians 11, "have you not houses to eat and to drink in?". With the emphasis on the physicality of the Eucharist as his physical body ("ο τρωγων μου την σαρκα", -- note the vocabulary), and with the promise of eternal life from the Eucharist alone, Christ did not want people to stop eating any other food whatsoever.
When Jesus says he is the door, does he invoke Aristotelian categories of accidence and substance?
He did not "invoke categories" in John 6 either, he simply said what He also said at the Last Supper, "this is my body". The philosophical superstructure of transubstantiation is there to explain the fact of the real presence, not the fact itself. At any rate, of course the Gospels are filled with allegory. Jesus the Door is obviously an allegory: you cannot enter the Church but through Jesus just as you cannot enter any building but through the door. He also said He is the vine. He did not tell the disciples to do something symbolic with doors and vine in His memory. Everyone understood Him in both cases as being allegorical; no one raised any controversy. But in John 6, Christ's speech was insistent on the Eucharist being "food indeed", and the people that were present understood Him literally. Indeed St. Paul in 1 Cor. 11 speaks of the Eucharist containing the body of Christ that ought to be discerned, shows the death of Christ and is capable of condemnation (1 Cor. 11:26-30); all these things cannot be said of some symbol or allegory.
It does not follow that since in some places the Bible has an allegory, like "door", "vine", "field", "seed" pointing to spiritual realities, then everything you don't like in it is also an allegory. That body on the Cross surely wasn't allegorical, was it?
Tertullian outside the camp as well?
Tertullian as a whole is not to be taken for granted: he fell to heresy, was never sainted by the Church; St. Augustine is not inerrant either. But in these passages nothing heretical is even alleged: any sacrament is a sign and it is possible to speak of the Eucharist as something relative to incarnate Christ. It is only the distorted lens of Protestantism that makes these passages cause a double take.
We didn’t invent it
It is possible that someone somewhere spoke of the Eucharist as a sign, or even as a figure of Christ, even though neither Augustine or Tertullian are good authority. Surely the Early Church already held the modern position. Her, for example, is St. Ignatius of Antioch (2 C.):
They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against this gift of God, incur death in the midst of their disputes.
we have so much in common, and yet must part ways on this, all because Trent anathematized dissent
Protestantism grew out of Catholicism so naturally it inherited much from the Church. However, the "symbolic" view is indeed heretical and the only reason it had not been anathemized earlier is because it was not seriously held earlier.