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.
So your becoming a Christian was involuntary, therefore no problem with private judgment. Like some are born Muslim, so that must be right too. Got it. Too bad for atheists and others with no such background. They can't go crossing that Tiber (or go visit Mecca etc) unless they figure out, from private judgment, it's the right thing to do. And that's a problem, because "private judgment" is, after all, fallible. We or they could be wrong, no matter what we decide.
But of course I reject your premise. There is no scriptural account of anyone becoming a Christian by birth, or by infant baptism. Your volition made you Catholic, and therefore, regardless of the degree to which it is obscured, your private judgment, your decision to seek fellowship with any given community of faith, was and remains based on your fallible private judgment.
we take the scripture on its direct face value
Except for here:
Jesus the Door is obviously an allegory
Obviously? Obvious to whom? To you, in the great wisdom of your private judgment? Well it IS obvious, and requires no magisterium for such a conclusion, but it is obvious because God gives some light to every man, including the ordinary powers of language, reason, and reasonable inferences.
By which we also conclude that Jesus really meant what he said when he said "the flesh profits nothing; my words are spirit, and they are life."
Do you see the problem here? And I testify to this because I have engaged many a cultist, all of whom had their preprogrammed library of excuses for not accepting "face value" teachings of Scripture. There is nothing about transubstantiation that has anything to do with the face value of Scripture.
Transubstantiation per se was neither seen nor heard of until invented by Benedictine monk Radbertus in the 9th Century. It was ratified in general terms in 1215 by the 4th Lateran Council, and came through the instrumentality of pagan Greek philosopher Aristotle at the hand of Aquinas in the 13th Century. It explains nothing. It only obscures.
As for Ignatius, surely you understand his frame of reference. In the battle against Docetism, it was necessary to point out that the basis of the Eucharist was not some phantom aeon of the Christ spirit, but God come in the flesh. His words correspond exactly to the afore-quoted Tertullian, who inferred from the figure of the Eucharist a real, corporeal Christ whom the Gnostics could not deny.
But neither in Tertullian nor Ignatius are we locked into the special meaning of “is” created out of whole cloth by Radbertus and sealed into Roman doctrine by Aquinas. To shove the entire package known as transubstantiation into the verb of being wherever you find it is to ignore, to amputate, if you will, a necessary understanding of the ordinary language of the day, an understanding you yourself have just now acknowledged, in that you have no problem taking “is” non-literally when you do not have a Roman doctrine at stake:
Jesus the Door is obviously an allegory
So you see perhaps the problem of the Protestant apologist. To us, it appears your RC hermeneutic grants you wide latitude to use “is” however it suits you at the moment. You can then claim you are the only ones who take it at face value (because you have also defined “face value”), when in fact that is the opposite of what has just happened.
The Protestant hermeneutic, on the other hand, does not allow extraordinary meanings to words that work just as well with ordinary meanings. This does limit us; it compels us to exclude hidden meanings not evident from the ordinary meanings of words. Especially words that had no definition until eight centuries later.
As for your commentary on Augustine, I am familiar with the “both/and” theory of reconciling his apparently Protestant language regarding signs with the much later development of transubstantiation. If you find that theory credible or satisfactory, that’s up to you. For me, I am again bound to ordinary meanings for ordinary language. It is obvious he does not see the sign as also being the thing signified:
“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”
Augustine has gone to great pains to ensure his reader does NOT do the very thing you invite him to do. He clearly separates the thing the sign is about from the sign itself, and he further blockades abuse of his words by calling such confusion as you advocate a weakness.
Baptized people do not physically die and then rise from the dead in the baptismal waters. If that were the case, there would be none who doubt the truth of the Christian faith. But it is instead a spiritual exercise, with an outward sign to an inward reality.
Likewise, the bread and the wine of the holy meal are signs by which we remember and adore the one who died for our sins. It breaks my heart that He had to go to such lengths for someone as unworthy as me. But He did, and I am grateful for it.
How anyone can suggest we do not think of His sacrifice for us as real, and His presence with us as exquisitely real, is beyond me. God is spirit, and nothing is more real than God. His words are spirit, and they are life.
Defend as you must, but the fact is that no where was spiritual and eternal life obtained by physically eating food, much less a Christianized form of endocannibalism.
I Cor. 11 is not even referring to the elements being the body of the Lord, but the church, as explained here by God's grace, as the next chapter also focuses on, with the members in 1Cor. 11:17-34 "showing” the Lord's sacrificial death and resurrection by how they show this love and unity with Christ and each other in partaking of the communal meal (thus they were told they actually did not eat the Lord's supper due to their independence and selfishness in so doing, and "shame them that have not"), effectual recognizing each other as members for whom Christ died
And no matter how RCs try to deny it, they are inconsistent in holding Jn. 6:53,54 as literal while upholding V2 teaching that properly baptized Prots have the Holy Spirit in them and working thru them.
And they are are also inconsistent with the all-or-nothing hermeneutic they insist on here in denying other places where elements are called the blood of men or men are called bread, or as is the Word of God. Such as,
And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me drink of the of the well of Beth–lehem, which is by the gate! And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew out of the well of Beth–lehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David: nevertheless but . And he said, Be it far from me, O Lord, that I should do this: is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives ? therefore he would not drink it. These things did these three mighty men. (2 Samuel 23:15-17)
And or why will Catholic refuse* to believe the word of God literally when it clearly states that the Canaanites were “bread: “Only rebel not ye against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us” (Num. 14:9)
And or that the Promised Land was “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof.” (Num. 13:32)
And or when David said that his enemies came to “eat up my flesh.” (Ps. 27:2)
And or when Jeremiah proclaimed, Your words were found. and I ate them. and your word was to me the joy and rejoicing of my heart” (Jer. 15:16)
And or when Ezekiel was told, “eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” (Ezek. 3:1)
And or when (in a phrase similar to the Lord’s supper) John is commanded, “Take the scroll ... Take it and eat it.” (Rev. 10:8-9 )
And since the Lord said that “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me,” (John 6:57) and He said man should “live by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God - quoting Scripture, and that His “meat was to do the will of Him that sent Me,” (Mt. 44:; Jn. 4:34) and that “the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life,” and that souls are only shown receiving life by believing the gospel message,” (Eph. 1:13) and the Word in general is what builds one up, (Acts 20:32) then why will not Catholic even allow that the Lord was referring to “eating” and “drinking” figuratively, as believing on and obeying the Word made flesh in order to gain life and live by Christ?
Especially since John abounds with figurative language and contrasting use of the temporal earthly physical to refer to the eternal heavenly spiritual.
Moreover, they are also inconsistent by rejecting other uses of figurative language in John, consistent with Jn. 6, as being literal,
• In John 1:29, Jesus is called “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” — but he does not have hoofs and literal physical wool.
• In John 2:19 Jesus is the temple of God: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” — but He is not made of literal stone.
• In John 3:14,15, Jesus is the likened to the serpent in the wilderness (Num. 21) who must “be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal” (vs. 14, 15) — but He is not made of literal bronze.
• In John 4:14, Jesus provides living water, that “whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (v. 14) — but which was not literally consumed by mouth.
• In John 7:37 Jesus is the One who promises “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” — but this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive. (John 7:38)
• In Jn. 9:5 Jesus is “the Light of the world” — but who is not blocked by an umbrella.
• In John 10, Jesus is “the door of the sheep,”, and the good shepherd [who] giveth his life for the sheep”, “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” vs. 7, 10, 11) — but who again, is not literally an animal with cloven hoofs.
• In John 15, Jesus is the true vine — but who does not physically grow from the ground nor whose fruit is literally physically consumed.
*Don’t tell me cannibalism is forbidden, for a form of that is what Catholics engage in. hen the fearful Israelites exclaimed that the Promised Land was “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof;”
Endocannibalism is most often an expression of veneration of the dead, or the pursuit of consuming some esoteric aspect of the person, like the deceased’s wisdom.
The Fore peoples of Papua New Guinea had a strongly codified type of endocannibalism as part of funerary rites. In this tribe, women and children played the largest role in cannibalism among deceased Fore males. - http://people.howstuffworks.com/cannibalism2.htm
Alpers and Lindenbaum’s research conclusively demonstrated that kuru [neurological disorder] spread easily and rapidly in the Fore people due to their endocannibalistic funeral practices, in which relatives consumed the bodies of the deceased to return the “life force” of the deceased to the hamlet, a Fore societal subunit. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_%28disease%29#Transmission
[There is a story of a Western business man in the last century who saw a Bible in the store of a client in New Guinea and remarked, “Don’t tell me you believe that nonsense!” The store owner calmly replied, “Sir, let assured you that if it were not for the Book which you called nonsense, my friends and I would be having you for dinner right now.”]