Posted on 02/13/2021 8:18:22 AM PST by HypatiaTaught
Good morning my conservative FRiends.
I am reaching out to hopefully get an answer to my lifelong question of a central belief in the Christian faith, especially the Roman Catholic faith.
Background: I grew up in a very Roman Catholic family. I am number 10 of 13 children, 8 boys, 5 girls. Mom also had 2 miscarriages which in truth, she became pregnant with 10 boys rather than the 8. Mom had 15 pregnancies in 17 years.
We went to Mass every Sunday and all the holy days. Mom actually taught Catechism to the community and was a very loving soul.
My question since the age of eight and remains 50 years later, why do we have the belief of actually having to eat the body of Jesus Christ?
I am a very logical person, but this concept of consuming the flesh of God's son to obtain salvation simply doesn't make sense. I get that he died for our sins and was sacrificed. I know the history of sacrifices 2000 years ago. Tribes sacrificed lambs, goats and other livestock. But why the eating of his body or any human body? We don't eat humans. I don't even eat animals any more, for digestive purposes. Maybe I am the only one who finds this tenant extremely disturbing.
It’s a religious thing. Doesn’t fit for you, ignore it.
If you want to discuss theology, study some first.
It might not make sense to us humans, but it is in his Word.
A lot of Bible does not make sense to people who believe it all their lives.
I am no expert but take the verses about eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ as symbolic to his sacrifice. Bread of life is a metaphor. Bread from heaven is a metaphor. Living bread is a metaphor. Bread of God is a metaphor. Jesus extends the bread metaphor to his actual, soon-to-come sacrifice on the cross. Drinking of his blood was just to emphasize his point. Blood and bread are a metaphors for life, in this case Christ’s, who indwells believers.
It is a gift, a free gift, you don’t have to ask for anything. Your sins have already been forgiven. All you have to do is believe in the Gospel, which is spelled out for us in 1 Cor 15:3-4 and further proofed in Rom 10:10.
No. As the gospels tell us many did not believe and stopped following Jesus. Jesus did not correct them. Jesus’ flesh and blood certainly profited all of us with the opportunity to enter heaven. There have been many heresies that rejected God’s teachings and truth and stopped following the way of Jesus.
It sounds more like protestant heresy. Understand what Jesus taught and has been understood and followed by Catholics for over 2000 years.Try to understand the protestant version was man made 1500 years after the Resurrection of Jesus.
“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” ...John 6:53
“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I am in him.” John 6:56
What you eat becomes converted into your own body cells. Thus, Christ becomes part of you. You absorb him into your physical being as well as spiritual.
My belief.
If that actually is the body and blood of Christ through transubstantiation (which it isn’t), why do Roman Catholics feel they need to re-sacrifice Christ thousands of times every day at each mass conducted around the world?
Logic vs Faith.
You cannot apply logic when you consider whether YOU BELIEVE in GOD.
You either believe or you don't.
Logic is for math.
What an asinine comment! Someone is asking a legitimate spiritual question and you’re degrading them. Were you born an ass or have you had to really work at being one?
Jesus is the bread of life, He is also the living water.
Go to Him and you will never hunger or thirst.
“Do this in remembrance of me”.
Drinking water in those days was risky, they tended to drink wine with their meals.
Never have I read, nor can infer that partaking in the Lords Supper, is a requirement for salvation.
Many wise men would disagree with you. C.S. Lewis is just 1 example.
If you ever decide to grow, I can explain the detailed neuroscience of the process.
Of course you can. Otherwise, what you believe would simply hinge on who filled your head first. Without regard to logic, Mohamed might be the one you praise five times a day.
Truth and logic are VERY important to the Almighty.
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.
This is interesting, as a simple google search of this question is answered well on many levels.
I think you want an answer to a question that you did not ask...to the question you asked, the answer is right in the question - Christ said one must eat/gnaw and drink to have eternal life - we eat and drink to have eternal life because Christ commands this. He did this in Both Covenants - if you do not eat the Paschal/Passover Saving Lamb you will die and not have life - so the Lord says in Moses and the New Moses/Christ.
Why has the All-Wise and Living God done it this way, is this the question? Or why and how does eating and drinking bring eternal life - is this your real query, or another?? The answer is simple, the Lord has Written and Spoken and Incarnated Him and this throughout His Sacred Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation! If this is the question, or another, - please share and one can answer it.
Always though, first and fundamental, is man obeys the Wisdom of what the Lord Wills and Directs: man, male and female, eats and drinks the Father’s Will no matter the cost to avoid the forbidden fruit of the sin, of doing his own will. Jesus only eats and drinks the Father’s Will, the Food and Drink He witnessed to the Apostles at the Well with the Samaritan Woman and 3 times in His Agony of the Garden. When we worthily without the leprosy of sin, eat and drink Christ, sacramentally not cannibally, we enter most fully into the Saving Paschal Lamb’s and Head’s ‘Loving Obedience in not refusing but embracing the Father’s Saving Will and Love by which we are reconciled to the Father into Paschal Covenant Life and Love - we become and are ‘in and one with Jesus’ own Loving Obedience unto death’ so that we are raised up into Life, and by this continuously eating and drinking of Christ’s Forever ‘YES’ of Loving Obedience in Holy Communion, we are nourished and strengthened to faithfully love one another as He Loved us and walk in the Way of True Loving Obedience that leads to the Glory of Eternal Life...blessings and mercies
Not according to transubstantiation.
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Neither of these is the teaching of the Church. The Church teaches that Jesus is truly and substantially present in the Eucharist. It is not literal or we would see the man Jesus physically sitting on our altars. It's not merely symbolic in that it would then just be an empty ritual, which Jesus would never command us to do as he clearly did in John 6 and at the Last Supper. It is a symbol, but only in the sense that we cannot see a physical manifestation the heavenly reality that is there.
Jesus didn’t tell us to follow man’s truth, just the opposite he warned us against false teachers.
Your comment:”With all due respect to my Catholic brothers and sisters, this is a symbolic act.”
It doesn’t sounded like a symbolic act or was practiced by Catholic for over 2000 years. Scientific evidence has examined consecrated host as human cardiac tissue Blood type AB. I recommend that you do a search for Eucharistic miracles.
Your comment: “No longer do we need to follow rituals and laws to be saved.”
Jesus came not to change the law, but to fulfill it. Jesus told us to keep His commandments and die in the state of his grace. He will judge all of us upon our death. Jesus gave us 7 Sacraments for our salvation. Jesus also gave us His Catholic Church for our salvation and told us to teach and baptize all nations with his truth.
Your comment:”Personally, I don’t understand the belief in transubstantiation.”
Yes, I understand that this can be hard to understand. Yet Jesus clearly told us that we need to eat and drink His Body and Blood for our salvation. Can you imagine Jesus that loves us so much that he died for us, and Jesus who can do all things, left us His Body and Blood for us so that He would be literally with us for our eternal salvation?
I hope that you search for God’s Truth. Not my word but the words of Jesus.
Those aren't the way to salvation either. They are follow on attributes of a believer (that Jesus is God, that He died for your sins), but they are not first for salvation.
I’d not have posted my view in a catholic caucus thread. I do understand the insurmountable gaps between Roman Catholic theology and Protestant theology. You are right that it does pretty much spring from sola scriptura. A more precise phrase might be the supremacy scriptura because we do believe in one holy (c)atholic church and in the authority of our ordained church government- but only because, again, it’s scriptural. So in our view scripture is the final authority, which in some sense makes it the only authority.
Then you can get even more precise and say it is the authority of God Himself, since it’s His word, and He wrote it for that purpose.
Anyway I know the difference.
The Catholic Church does not teach that. It teaches that the Holy sacrifice of the mass is the re-presentation of the same sacrifice that Jesus offered on Calvary. From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
CCC 1365 Because it is the memorial of Christ's Passover, the Eucharist is also a sacrifice. The sacrificial character of the Eucharist is manifested in the very words of institution: "This is my body which is given for you" and "This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in my blood." [Lk 22:19-20] In the Eucharist Christ gives us the very body which he gave up for us on the cross, the very blood which he "poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." [Mt 26:28]
CCC 1366 The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit:
[Christ], our Lord and God, was once and for all to offer himself to God the Father by his death on the altar of the cross, to accomplish there an everlasting redemption. But because his priesthood was not to end with his death, at the Last Supper "on the night when he was betrayed," [he wanted] to leave to his beloved spouse the Church a visible sacrifice (as the nature of man demands) by which the bloody sacrifice which he was to accomplish once for all on the cross would be re-presented, its memory perpetuated until the end of the world, and its salutary power be applied to the forgiveness of the sins we daily commit. [1 Cor 11:23; Heb 7:24, 27]
CCC 1367 The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice: "The victim is one and the same: the same now offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of offering is different." "And since in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and is offered in an unbloody manner. . . this sacrifice is truly propitiatory." [Heb 9:14,27]
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