Book Review: 100 Biblical Arguments Against Sola Scriptura

That phrase was an expression of the poster's mind not a reading of yours, i.e. the points he believes you must make in defense of the Catholic Church.

If the thread becomes redirected from the issues to a discussion about you or the other poster, personally, then that would be "making it personal."

the entire sentence was “ your task is to defend “ — now at other times when I’ve said “your masters tell you to”, you’ve said that was making it personal..

Every church claims they embody the first church. and in a sense they are right. Read the NT and you see factionalism left and right.
What I don’t see is people is people spiritualy speaking to a dead marry, or anyone else. I don’t see anyone bowing before a statue in reverence or worship. I don’t see baby baptisms. A baptism must be a personal choice, or it is a bath.
I don’t see a formal confessional, but I don’t see that as sin. No man can grant to deny forgiveness on behalf of God. and many seem to use it as a way to sin feely and then cleans themselves by telling a priest dirty stories. But yes, we are commanded to confess our sins, one to another. But that is for accountability, not forgiveness. It is easy to sin in secret. Not so easy when someone is holding you accountable. And a priest isn’t always a good accountability partner. He is a man like any other. I’ve heard numerous stories of blabbermouth preachers or their wives. Ask anyone who does addiction theropy about the value of that.

As for miracles, those continue to this day and are performed by many, even in faiths I think are off the wall. All have gifts.
Many churches feed the poor, not just Catholics.
I read the NT, and see a church that shares much of what any church today has, including Catholicism. I see people reading scripture to prove what was taught, not simply taking a man’s word for it like many choose.(even Protestants do that.)
You want to see your church as the original based on the NT, but I see the basics of most churches. After that, you and many others started to add to what they did, just as the Pharisees did. You aren’t alone in that, and it isn’t necessarily sin, though I do see some that are sin or come dangerous close to sin. But it is the traditions of men seeking to earned their way in.

why don't you study scripture and see for yourself how utterly wrong it is to deny Christ's True presence in the Eucharist.if you read in the Bible, starting from John 6:30, we read

30 So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do?
31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’
32 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.
33 For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
34 “Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
35 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
36 But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe.

They asked Him for a sign, saying that Moses gave them manna in the desert. If Jesus (according to them) was aspiring to the level of Moses, He should do something as big as that.

and Jesus says something strange to them -- He says Moses didn't give you bread, My father did, and bread that comes down from heaven. Then He says that HE is the bread of life, HE is the manna -- and manna was to be eaten.

The people around Him made the same mistake you did, which is to think he was speaking as a metaphor.

Yet Jesus REPEATED the same thing, saying

48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died.
50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.
51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

And now the crowd is openly rebellious saying “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
And

53 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.
55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.
56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.
57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.
58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.

Note -- Jesus doesn't clear up the Metaphor, like he did in Matt. 16:5–12

5 When they went across the lake, the disciples forgot to take bread.
6 “Be careful,” Jesus said to them. “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
7 They discussed this among themselves and said, “It is because we didn’t bring any bread.”
8 Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked, “You of little faith, why are you talking among yourselves about having no bread?
9 Do you still not understand? Don’t you remember the five loaves for the five thousand, and how many basketfuls you gathered?
10 Or the seven loaves for the four thousand, and how many basketfuls you gathered?
11 How is it you don’t understand that I was not talking to you about bread? But be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
12 Then they understood that he was not telling them to guard against the yeast used in bread, but against the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

So, Jesus DOES indicate when it is a metaphor and when it isn't.
In this case, look at the reaction of his DISCIPLES, people who had heard his teachings for so long and followed him

60 On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”...

66 From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

You cannot say that this was just bread and wine of that this is a metphor for coming and having faith in the Lord or some kind of metphor for believing in Christ because of the reaction of the Jews and the very language -- to eat one's flesh and drink the blood means to do violence on some one. You see it even in Hindi where a threat is "Mein tera Khoon pie jaongaa" or "I will drink your blood" -- and this is among vegetarians! To drink a persons blood means a serious threat of injury.So, if you believe that this was just a metphor, you mean to say that Christ is rewarding people for crucifying Him?!! That's nonsensical, sorry.

You cannot even say it was a metaphor by incorreclty comparing it to John 10:9 (I am the gate/doorway) or John 15:1 (I am the true vine) is because this is not referenced in the entire verse in the same way as John 6 which shows the entire incident from start to finish of Jesus saying His body is to be eaten, repeating it and seeing his disciples go and not correcting them (as he did in Matthew 16).

Even in the literal sense -- Christ says he is the gateway to heaven and the vine such that we get nourishment with him as the connecting path. But John 6 is much much more than mere symbolism as He categorically states that "For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed" (John 6:55).

Even at the end of John 6, Jesus rebukes those who think of what He has said as a metaphor by emphasising that

61 Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you?
62 Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before!
63 The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit[e] and life.
64 Yet there are some of you who do not believe.”

Jesus repeats the rebuke against just thinking in terms of human logic (Calvin's main problem) by saying

John 8:15 You judge by human standards; I pass judgment on no one.
16 But if I do judge, my decisions are true, because I am not alone. I stand with the Father, who sent me.

Just using human logic as Calvinist thought does, without God's blessings behind it fails in grace.John 6:63 does not refer to Jesus's statement of his own flesh, if you read in context but refers to using human logic instead of dwelling on God's words.

And, all of this is confirmed in Paul's writings to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 10:16)

6 Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ?

and also 1 Cor 11:27-29

27 So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.
28 Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup.
29 For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.

How clear can Paul get? "The bread IS a participation in the body of Christ" and "who eats the bread... will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord" This is not just mere bread and wine anymore. This is the body and blood of Christ.

Finally, the Earliest Christians also said any consideration of this as just a metaphor was false -- Ignature of Antioch (disciple of Apotle John) wrote in AD 110 wrote about heretics who abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again" (Letter to the SMyrnaens). The earliest Christians beleived this to be the ACTUAL body of Christ. Why, they were also accused by pagans of being cannibals and Justin MArtyr had to write a defence to the Emperor saying "Not as common bread or common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nourished, . . . is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus"

in view of this overwhelming evidence from scripture and supplemented by the practise and belief of the earliest Christians, we can only say that there IS a real presence in the Eucharist. Martin Luther too believed it -- he said that Who, but the devil, has granted such license of wresting the words of the holy Scripture? Who ever read in the Scriptures, that my body is the same as the sign of my body? or, that is is the same as it signifies? What language in the world ever spoke so? It is only then the devil, that imposes upon us by these fanatical men.

I don't recall telling you that "your masters tell you to" was mind reading. It may have been "making it personal" if the thread was derailed into a discussion about individual Freepers.

Do you have the link?

Not off-hand. That was in 2011 :-)

I don’t see baby baptisms. A baptism must be a personal choice, or it is a bath.

Not necessarily. Scripture does record that "entire households" were baptised. I'll grant you that it doesn't explicitly say babies were baptised, but then it doesn't explicitly say they weren't...

And a priest isn’t always a good accountability partner. He is a man like any other. I’ve heard numerous stories of blabbermouth preachers or their wives

yet you don't hear of priests from orthodoxy or Lutheran pastors blabbing about what's said in the confessional. It's inspite of themselves that, not any great personal will-power.

You want to see your church as the original based on the NT, but I see the basics of most churches

Not most. I see the One Holy Apostolic Catholic Church (Orthodox, Catholic, Oriental, Assyrian) reflected as I see the Lutherans and Anglicans, but not all the others. Methodists to an extent yes, but Christian Scientists no. Baptists -- depending on which yes and no. Same for Pentecostals -- Assemblies of God are orthodox, but Benny Hinn isn't... etc

And remember that even Calvinists disavow sola scriptura completely -> remember the Marburg Colloquy

You want to

Reading the mind of another Freeper is a form of "making it personal."

Discuss the issues all you want, but do not make it personal.

Forgot about groups like christian scientists. I haven’t explored every possible avenue of christianity.

I think we are all going to be surprised by who is and isn’t there. like those who think all catholics are damned. Don’t be too sure on all christian scientists, though I only know of them by name.

In the end, we face Him as individuals. No one will be able to blame their teacher, when He left us His Word to test them on. At least in. th he free world.

I’ve heard from angry Catholics that would disagree. They won’t go to, confession because of diarrhea of the mouth. I presume that the clergy would stomp on that, but then they tried to ignore pedophiles. Not trying to insult, but they did try to ignore the issue. Lack of self policing is common in. any organization.

And pastors can have the same issues with privacy. I remember sharing a personal issue with a pastor over the phone, only to realize his family was hearing half the conversation. That was wrong.
Years ago, knew a pastor who shared everything with his wife, who LOVED her phone. Funny that no one confided in. him.

Picks who you trust on a personal basis. Not all are worthy.

“I don’t see baby baptisms. A baptism must be a personal choice, or it is a bath.

Not necessarily. Scripture does record that “entire households” were baptised. I’ll grant you that it doesn’t explicitly say babies were baptised, but then it doesn’t explicitly say they weren’t...”

I’d say you’re reaching there. every documented baptism was done after the personal understood what they were doing and why before they got wet. my pastor made sure I knew what I was doing before dunking me under. And my current church goes over the “what for and why is” before baptisms.

Christianity is personal choice and understanding, not mysterious ritual. You can’t force another, and it would mean nothing. A baby does not understand or consent to what is happening.

Do you call your male progenitor “Father, Dad, Daddy, Daddy’o?” If you do, you are in the wrong!

Perhaps there’s more to this saying of the Lord than meets the eye...

+JMJ,
-Theo

I got to agree on that one. It’s a traditional attack on the Catholics, when Jesus meant Heavenly Father.

I don’t hold with some catholics practices, but that a meaningless issue.

Do you call your male progenitor “Father, Dad, Daddy, Daddy’o?”

No, I do not. I call him by his given name. Relatives ask me about that. You either follow Gods Word or you do not. I also do not address any preacher by "Reverend". It is used one time (in the Bible) as a reference to God.

“”You want to point to where I ever denied the Trinity???””

If you don’t believe the following you have denied the Trinity. Anything else is a heretic

This one God however exists in three persons, or in the Greek hypostases. God has but a single divine nature, and a single will, and is of but one substance; all three persons are coeternal, none of them having been created by another. However, because God exists in three persons, God has always loved, and there has always existed perfectly harmonious communion between the three persons of the Trinity.

http://vivificat1.blogspot.com/2009/06/trinity-orthodox-explanation.html#ixzz1zndIgAc9

1. On Logos.

Actually, “logos” as it is used in John 1:1 is probably more a creature of Heraclitus than Aristotle. But I do agree, it is one of the most interesting double meanings in Scripture. God reveals himself through His word and His Word. Yet the Greek usage had elevated the term to also express the idea of the rational principle that governs the universe. What a great way to introduce the human race to Christ the Creator of all.

However, there are differences between that and the problem with transubstantiation. Logos teaches us who Christ is, and it was clearly a part of the enscripturated Gospel message from the beginning. Transubstantiation is a tortured way to explain a physical miracle that gives no evidence of its occurrence, that came very late in the evolution of doctrine, and that is the basis of anathematizing those who should still be brothers and sisters in a common faith. It is therefore inherently schismatic.

And Aristotle wouldn’t like what Aquinas did with his categories either, reversing the sense of substance and accidence as he did. In the end, transubstantiation per se explains nothing. It is a complete muddle. It baffles me to see someone as intelligent as Aquinas get caught up in his own version of epicycles. But we are all products of our own times, so I should probably be more generous.

2. On Epiousion

As you pointed out, epiousion is a word that only occurs in the context of the bread petition of the Lord’s Prayer. But if you’re a lexicographer, that’s not a good thing, that’s a bad thing. A one-off word is extraordinarily difficult to translate. The context of a broader literature is completely missing, and the ordinary apparatus for deriving a meaning must be replaced with a process that analyzes the components of the word in hopes of finding some combination of templates that when taken together make sense.

BTW, I used Chrysostom in my previous post, not to prove usage definitively, but to only show that there is some early testimony to the simple rendering of “daily” bread in Matt 6:11. I might have also cited Origen, who was less definite, but did not go the direction of Jerome’s “supersubstantial” notion, which has the problem that it is only one of several possible arrangements of the term’s components.

There are a number of theories concerning the meaning of epiousion. I feel the technical issues are somewhat beyond my range of skill, so I would direct you to an incomplete list of resources that I found helpful (I am still vetting some other possible sources):

Epiousion as a term of measurement, the daily ration of bread:
http://www.metrum.org/measures/epiousios.htm

The notion of bread as doctrine and “eating” messiah already active in Talmudic sources:
http://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/lightfoot-new-testament/john/6.html?p=3

Epiousion as a more specialized form of “daily” expressing the arrival of the new day. Note especially the potential re-division of the adjective into ep’-iosa, which has multiple testimonies in participial form elsewhere in Scripture, which would remove the cloud of hapax legomenon, and apparently is drawing some attention among scholars:
http://www.rededicate.org/archives/UploadMarriage/fourthpetitionLP.html

My own conclusion thus far is that these words may have been rich with multiple meanings when Christ first spoke them. Through the ages how many of God’s little children have wondered where their next meal would come from. They could look to this gentle prayer and see that the Creator of all things knew of their need and would provide for them, one day at a time, just as he said elsewhere. In this sense, the bread of the dawning day is perfectly a sensible thing to pray for in the darkness of the early morning hours.

But God is the God of all wisdom, and would certainly have a message to his people Israel embedded in everything Jesus publically taught, yet in parables, so that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not hear, as he again shrewdly divides between the self-wise and the innocently child-like. The people have called him “the prophet,” the one foretold by Moses, the new Moses. He has preached about the manna from Heaven, and given food in abundance to the 5000, as a miracle sign to Israel that he is indeed their Messiah. They start to get it. He is the provider of the new miracle bread from Heaven.

But they are still materialists. They really don’t get it. They know he could be the one sent by God, but even the miracle bread, the new manna they seek from him, is only for the satisfying of their physical needs. They don’t understand that he does not speak to them in physical terms, but in spiritual terms, as he said in John 6:63.

And yet, for those who can hear it, he is more than the provisioner of food for the belly. He is the bread of life itself. Not in the sense of physical miracles involving invisible transformation of physical objects, but in the sense of offering himself on the cross for our sin, his body in place of our body, his blood in place of our blood, which offerings would be the perfect satisfaction to God for all our sin. In that sense, he is the bread of life, the miracle bread from the hand of God, for the people of God. It is him, and it is his word, his life, his doctrine, upon which we feed, not in any material sense, but as he said, his words are spirit, and they are life.

Conclusion:

So while I do not claim to have completely solved the puzzle, I do sincerely wish to avoid the “Giant Spaceship Behind the Sun” fallacy (GSBS). GSBS is where you boldly assert there is a giant spaceship behind the Sun because the other guy can’t prove there isn’t one, for now. GSBS is particularly bad when you start basing your life on belief in the alien craft, and start anathematizing those who are, shall we say, reserving judgment for stronger evidence.

Likewise, endowing epiousion in Matt 6:11 with a super-technical, theologically sophisticated meaning that won’t show up in full form till nine centuries later flies in the face of cautious logic. The assertion cannot be falsified, at least not until we can send a probe to the other side of the Sun. Of course then the giant ship could engage its cloaking device … but I digress. :)

Peace,

SR

I see you are quite busy with other posters, so I don’t know if you’ll see this, but I did want to respond briefly, just to let you know I wasn’t ignoring you.

As to the question you are asking, I have elaborated on it elsewhere and I am short on time and do not feel like unfurling the whole thing again. Bottom line, there are some who use the word “real” to mean “corporeal plus.” But real is whatever actually exists, and that can be spirit just as much as it can be atoms and quarks. God is spirit, and God is real. Therefore spirit is real.

Take that definitional framework back to the original context of the post of mine you’re quoting, and it should be quite clear to you what I am saying. Transubstantiation, no. Spiritual presence, yes, and as real as it gets.

Peace,

SR