Quick primer on Gnosticism. It is an early heresy going back to biblical times. Gnostics generally believe matter is evil and spirit is good. They believe they possess secret knowledge that is only obtained through spiritual or mystical means....not simply reading God’s word.
You see some of this kind of thing trying to slide its way into evangelical churches with mystical “disciplines” being encouraged - such as contemplative prayer and others.
You see some of this kind of thing trying to slide its way into evangelical churches with mystical “disciplines” being encouraged - such as contemplative prayer and others. The essence of the problem is that the subjective becomes the standard, rather than testing such by the objective, the Scriptures.
Then you have the consumed Christ of Catholicism. While within Docetism and or Gnosticism it seems they had the belief that what Christ looked and behaved like, as manifestly being incarnated with a tangible real body of flesh and blood, was not real (Christ being a sort of phantom but looking human), in Catholicism you have the belief that (in transubstantiation) what Christ looks, feels, tastes and would test as (bread and wine), is not the reality. With Christ's body and blood only looking like and otherwise materially evidencing themselves to be bread and wine. Which had ceased to exist when the priest uttered his words of consecration, with instead the hosts being Christ, present in His entirety in each particle (even at the subatomic level) by way of transubstantiation. Until the non-existent bread or wine begin to visibly decay. At which point the "Real Presence" - the “true Body of Christ and his true Blood” of Christ - is no longer present, and at which point Aquinas also argued that the substance of the bread and wine cannot return, despite appearance. Thus it seems nothing exists at that point, despite what material tests would show, as they would of the body of the incarnated Christ. More on this fantasy, by God's grace.