1.Jesus told the Jews they had to eat his body and drink his blood to have life, and that his flesh is real food and his blood real drink.
And what part of that would any Reformed or Southern Baptist or non-denominational store front church member disagree with? God is real, but God is a spirit. Love is real, but you cannot ingest it bodily. We are to live not by bread but every word from God's mouth, but no one I know of is eating pages from their Bible. Real does not have to be corporeal to be really real. Am I being real clear? :)
2.Furthermore many of His disciples stumbled at this teaching, were offended, and left Him. Had this teaching merely been that the Cup of Redemption and the Afikomen (the third cup in the Passover Seder and the matzah hidden as a game for the children, handed down to us today) that was meant to symbolize Him, even if the actual Seder differed, it seems strange to imagine the Jews, including some of his disciples stumbled over obvious symbolism. To the contrary, they interpreted Him literally, as the scriptures indicate, and did not have the faith to believe His words.
There was an argument in the crowd, a dispute among themselves. They didn't know what to make of what he was saying. That doesn't prove He was teaching Eucharistic realism in the sense of Aristotelian substances. It does prove, I would suggest, that they weren't listening very carefully to what he said before He got to the hard part:
Then said they unto him, Lord, evermore give us this bread. And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.
(John 6:34-35)
In which coming to him is in parallel with believing in him, and carries the same meaning, a classic Hebraic couplet, the meaning of which clarifies the entire passage, that the way we consume this Bread of Life, the means by which He comes to satisfy our hunger and our thirst, is by
us believing on Him. This was a disappointing answer to those whom He had just fed by the miracles of the loaves and the fishes. They were so into their own bellies that they were spiritually deaf to his very straightforward teaching here. Of course His body and blood are real, as they had to be to be given in sacrifice for us. But they become the all-satisfying food of eternal life to us who believe, simply because we believe in Him. Just as He said.
But even after lighting up the field so they could easily avoid the pitfall of raw materialism, what do they do but show their blindness and fall in anyway. They were blind because they did not believe, and they did not believe because the Father had not drawn them.
As to His core disciples, they did believe. Peter makes it clear;
Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away? Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God.
(John 6:67-69)
And what is Peter focused on? Does he say, "Yes, Lord, I'm willing to eat your physical body and blood?" No. He looks right past that, because he has understood: it's about belief in Jesus. He gets it.
3.Tradition testifies against it. We see about two millennia of holy communion unlike the Passover Seder, and unlike the bread and grape juice shared in Evangelical assemblies. Indeed, it is telling that the founding fathers of the Reformation famously split over whether Messiah was present in the elements or it was only a memorial. Notwithstanding the argument that there should be a common tradition to accompany an unbroken chain of the holy catholic apostolic church, none of the churches, denominations, sects, or faith groups have historically used the Passover Seder as the Lord's Supper. Whilst some can try to recreate or reform the Christian faith yet again, this time in a rabbinic Jewish context, and celebrate the Passover and Lord's Supper at the same time, and only once per year, it does not maintain continuity with almost two millennia of Christianity. It is a restoration attempt, without an Apostle, much less twelve genuine Jewish Apostles who lived, learned, and ate with Jesus. There should be a historic visible tradition of the Lord's Supper over the millennia, and there is.
The point of this thread is that there is a body of early tradition that supports a non-Aristotelian understanding of the elements of the Lord's Supper. One could look to a platonic sense of archetype to type to understand how realistic and anti-realistic language could sometimes occur side by side, without resort to Aristotle's view on substances. I would further argue that multiple strands of understanding survived well into the medieval period, as evidenced by the debate between
Ratramnus and Radbertus over the nature of the Eucharistic presence. So presenting that there has always been a monolithic Trent-like view of the Eucharist from day one is an ahistorical argument. It has rhetorical pizazz but falters on facts.
However, having said that, divine truth is not determined by majority vote. One of my favorite lines of Scripture is this, let God be true, and every man a liar. It doesn't matter if the number of the faithful is only eight when the ark is boarded. It doesn't matter that when Jesus comes on the scene he finds at first only a few faithful, and almost none among the leadership. It doesn't matter that a major world-wide religion professes to honor Jesus if it denies the truths Jesus taught in the Gospels. I refer of course to Islam. None of that matters to the project Jesus is carrying out, the building of His Ecclesia. As long as there has been at least one person alive somewhere who carried forward the torch of the true Gospel (though I am sure it was never that few), whether within or without man-made institutional boundaries, then the Ecclesia has survived, and has no need to be restored, only to become more well known, which necessarily means error must be refuted.
4.I understand someone saying that he does not have the faith to literally believe Jesus' teaching, just as so many did not have the faith to believe in the First Century as recorded by John. The proper response at that point is not to argue against the teaching, as some of them did, but to say, "Lord, I believe, help me with my unbelief." Become as a little child with respect to faith, so to speak.
But this begs the question. We do believe what Jesus is literally teaching. "Literal" means "according to the letter," and according to the letter of what he taught in the Bread of Life metaphor, we can have eternal life, our deepest spiritual hungers and thirsts met, if we come to Him in faith, if we believe in Him. Converting this passage into artificial support for a much later developed theory of Aristotelian substance swapping is hardly being faithful to the strict "letter" of the text.
Peace,
SR
And what part of that would any Reformed or Southern Baptist or non-denominational store front church member disagree with? God is real, but God is a spirit. Love is real, but you cannot ingest it bodily. We are to live not by bread but every word from God's mouth, but no one I know of is eating pages from their Bible. Real does not have to be corporeal to be really real.
of the loaves and the fishes. They were so into their own bellies that they were spiritually deaf to his very straightforward teaching here. Of course His body and blood are real, as they had to be to be given in sacrifice for us. But they become the all-satisfying food of eternal life to us who believe, simply because we believe in Him. Just as He said. I agree we must walk in the Spirit and believe the LORD Jesus Christ. The natural man does not understand the things revealed by the Spirit of the LORD; it appears as foolishness, such as arguing that Catholics, assuming the Catholic teaching is true, when receiving the Eucharist are violating the Torah, or Jesus violated the Torah in giving the teaching. Those points are akin to what the natural Jews in the text argued, and stumbled over.
When I read this I cannot help but think of a rotund pastor (not you) edifying his pious flock by preaching to them the error of the Jews grasping for bread, and then the emaciated figures of starving Jews and Gentiles enters my mind. Then I remember Jesus gave them "real food" and James tells us If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?
, James, catholic chapter two, Protestant verses fifteen and sixteen, as authorized by King James.
As for the religious among us in the States, is there an epidemic sun of gluttony ? How often do we hear homilies or sermons about gluttony and obesity ? How often do we restrain ourselves by fasting ?
Firm Faith, Fat Body? Study Finds High Rate of Obesity among Religious