12-27-2006, 02:32 PM
Peace......
FHC, I don't mind us having this discourse here. I believe it is the perfect place for muslims to see the error with which Catholics practice their faith. That being said, let us continue...
It is taught in Roman dogma that the Mass is the resacrificing of Jesus Christ. The priest officiating the Mass purports to call Christ down from heaven, and the bread and wine used in the ceremony supposedly becomes the literal body and blood of Christ, a process known as "transubstantiation". Thus, the belief is that the "very body and blood" of Christ are present in the sacramental elements. In practice, however, the wine ("blood") is withheld from the laity, and the explanation is forwarded that the body and the blood are concomitant, meaning that both are contained in the bread host, a practice that began in the 12th century due to fear that the "blood of Christ" might be spilled during administration (Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. VI, p.678)....This very act alone shows the unscripturalness of this practice, but let us continue.
Catholic apologists will sometimes calumniate by saying that the Mass is not a direct resacrifice, but rather a re-presentation or return to the sacrifice of Christ, but in practice, the Mass is treated as being a literal continuation of Christ's actual death and sacrifice. As the Catechism itself says about the "re-presentation" argument,
"The Eucharist is thus a <b>sacrifice</b> because it re-presents <b>(makes present)</b> the sacrifice of the cross, because it is a memorial and because it applies the fruit.”(Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1994 Edition, paragraph 1366)
"Re-presents" is defined specifically as "making present", hence the belief is in the "real presence" of the body and blood of Christ in the host and wine.
When Jesus was on the cross, He said, “It is finished”, and then bowed His head and gave up the ghost. (John 19:30) That phrase, “it is finished”, is translated from a single Greek word, teleo, which has the meaning of “being finished, completed, discharged completely (as in a debt)”. Ancient papyri receipts for taxes and other debts have been discovered which have this single Greek word scrawled across them - Paid In Full. That is what Jesus did on the cross. He paid our sin debt in full. There is now no longer any need for Him to be sacrificed, and there is no grace that can be obtained by “re-presenting” Him. There is certainly no redemptive value to continually “re-presenting” Him, as He has already paid the debt, risen from the dead, and opened the way into heaven for all who will simply believe and trust in Him alone. The Bible presents Jesus’ work on the cross as being final and permanent in nature. There is simply no need, and no biblical provision, for the continual, repeated sacrifice of the Son of God.
Transubstantiation, as was said earlier, is the dogma which says that the bread and wine, when ingested in the Mass, are supernaturally transformed into the literal body and blood of Christ, which then imparts blessing to the participant. This, however, is unscriptural. Christ commanded to take the Lord's Supper with the words, "...this do in remembrance of me." (Luke 22:19) He clearly indicates that the Lord's Supper was a symbolic act to remind us of His sacrifice on the cross, and His future return. Paul reiterates this in I Corinthians 11:26. Neither of them suggest that the Lord's Supper was to be considered the actual, physical body and blood of Christ.
Now, Catholics will point to John 6:48-71 and use this text as support for their contention that the body and blood of Christ were literally meant to be ingested. However, problems arise with this interpretation. First and foremost is that in verse 57 Christ says, "As the Living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me." Following the Catholic dogma to its conclusion, this verse can then only be interpreted as saying that Christ lives because He literally partakes of the flesh and blood of the Father (who is a spirit, and has no flesh or blood). If we live only by partaking of Christ's flesh and blood in the Eucharist, then Christ, who lives in the Father as we live in Christ, must live by eating and drinking the Father, a ludicrous notion which even Roman Catholic apologists would be unlikely to defend. Of course, what this verse REALLY means is clear and logical when understood from a symbolic perspective. Just as Christ had life because of His fellowship with the Father (due to their unity in the Godhead), so also do we have life when we are received back into the beloved fellowship of God through Christ. He is the bread of life, Christ is the means by which the spiritual hunger of man is truly fulfilled, and by which our once-dead spirits are given new life. "Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace are ye saved)". (Ephesians 2:5)
Also, in John 6:66 we are told that after His discourse on being the bread of life, many of Jesus' disciples left Him because they took His words literally, and were offended by what appeared on the surface to be ravings. They did not have the discernment to see that Jesus meant His words to be taken symbolically, that He was using symbolism just as He did in all His discourses. They did not understand that the Messiah would come speaking in parables (Psalms 78:2-4), just as Catholicism today doesn't understand the parabolic nature of John 6. In John 6:63, Jesus said, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." Jesus clearly told His disciples that His words were meant to be taken figuratively, that the spiritual understanding, not the physical and literal, was to be had. He was nourishment for their SPIRITS, not their physical BODIES, and His giving of Himself to be their nourishment was likewise spiritual, not physical. Just as Christ obviously was not a physical door, not a wooden plank with a metal doorknob, when He said "I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved..." (John 10:9), so also was he speaking figuratively when He spoke of the partaking of His flesh and blood by His followers.
This is the same problem Jehovahs Witnesses run into in their belief that Christ before his human existence was the archangel Michael, taken from the misunderstanding of 1st Thessalonians 4:16.
We see in John 6:65, the verse right prior to the one mentioned above, the reason why some of His disciples did not understand the figurative, symbolic nature of Christ's words in this chapter. "And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father." (John 6:65). The reason some of Christ's disciples were unfaithful, believed that He literally meant for them to partake of His flesh and blood, and left Him was because they were unregenerate people who had not faith given them from the Father to truly trust in Christ and rightly believe and understand His words. The same holds true for Catholics today who hold to the literalness of the flesh and blood in the Eucharist.
It is also interesting to note that in Matthew 26:29, AFTER the so-called "consecration of the first Mass", that Jesus refers to the wine as "THIS fruit of the vine". He still considered it to be wine, not His blood. Even if the Roman Church considers the wine to transubstantiate into Christ's blood, Jesus Himself, by the testimony of Scripture, apparently did not.
Also, the eating of blood is expressly forbidden by the Bible. Genesis 9:4 says, "But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat." This commandment to abstain from blood is from the Noahic dispensation and predates the law given to Moses, and is still binding on believers today. It is reiterated by James during the Jerusalem controversy in Acts 15:20 and 29. Believers are not to partake of blood, and God would not work in a way, such as transubstantiation, which would violate His own Word. To suppose that Christ was commanding His disciples to literally partake of His flesh and blood therefore would make Christ a minister of sin, encouraging His followers to partake of a practice which is contrary to Scripture, which would then make Christ also a sinner. If Christ were then a sinner, He could not serve as the spotless Lamb of God, the sacrifice for sin made in our place, and hence, the whole matter of the shedding of His blood and breaking of His body would be completely moot. Thus, by teaching the literality of the partaking of Christ's blood, Catholicism negates its own dogma when the logical application of Scripture is made.
Seeing as transubstantiation, the central element of the Mass, is not Scriptural, from whence then does it come? The answer is from pagan religious systems whose origins extend back to the antiquity of man's rebellion against His Creator (see Romans 1:21-23), and which gradually evolved over time into forms which, quite often independently, mimic not just the outward appearance but also the central theology of the Mass.
Among the very early Indo-Aryans, transubstantiation was known, whereby the Brahmins taught that rice-cakes which were offered in sacrifice to the gods were substitutes for real human beings, which were then converted into real flesh and blood by the manipulations of the priests. (Sir J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 490)
Sumner reported that in many primitive tribes, ceremonies exist in which the participants partake of images of the god made from grain flour, sometimes prepared using human blood kneaded into the dough, which a priest then turns into the god by means of magic formulas.(W.G. Sumner, Folkways, p. 337)
This primitive style of direct incorporation of the power of the various gods into the human existence continued as paganism became more refined. In ancient Mexico, The Aztecs and many other tribes believed in the ceremonial transformation of consecrated bread into the actual flesh and blood of various gods.
Likewise, in Egyptian mythology, a wafer of bread, inscribed with the name or symbology of Osiris, was offered to participants in cultic ceremonies after consecration by the priests of that god.(Encyclopedia of Religions, Vol. II, p. 76)
This last artifice continued into Christian times through the cult of Isis, one of the popular Oriental religious cults which found wide currency across the Roman Empire. In her cult, the mystery of the death of Osiris, and his subsequent rebirth as her son Horus, was celebrated. The flesh of the dead Osiris, then ruler of the underworld, was offered to the worshippers of the mother Isis and her perpetually infant son Horus.
The belief in transubstantiation, because of the widespread appearance of this doctrine in pagan societies without any apparent connexion, shows itself to be of very primeval origin, manifesting itself in as widely dispersed venues as Egypt, Mexico, and India. The Egyptian belief likely is what was incorporated into the syncretistic "Christianity" of the late Roman Empire. During the period of the 4th-5th centuries, the growing Roman church compromised with the pagan religions of the Empire in an effort to draw them into its sphere of influence and control. This syncretism, while retaining a veneer of Christian terminology and personage, became throughly paganised in its actual practices, one of which was the introduction of the belief in transubstantiation, as found in the doctrine of the "Real Presence" of Christ's flesh and blood in the host consecrated by priestly ritual. This pagan belief system was relatively slow to be adopted, but it eventually replaced the true worship of the risen Saviour in the bulk of European Christendom.
FHC, you quoted the early church fathers in your defense of transubstantiation, let's see what some who came before Aquinas had to say:
Justin Martyr (110-165 AD)
"Now it is evident, that in this prophecy allusion is made to the bread which our Christ gave us to eat, <b>in remembrance</b> of His being made flesh for the sake of His believers, for whom also He suffered; and to the cup which He gave us to drink, <b>in remembrance</b> of His own blood, with giving of thanks."
Here, Justin states that the bread and the cup were given to Christians for the purpose of remembrance. Not only this, but he also indicates that the remembrance denoted by the bread and wine was that of Christ's being made flesh and suffering for us, not of a presentation of the actual flesh and blood. Thus, Justin is expousing a commemorative view of the Lord's Supper.
Tertullian (145-220 AD)
"Come now, when you read in the words of David, how that 'the Lord reigneth from the tree,' I want to know what you understand by it. Perhaps you think some wooden king of the Jews is meant!--and not Christ, who overcame death by His suffering on the cross, and thence reigned! Now, although death reigned from Adam even to Christ, why may not Christ be said to have reigned from the tree, from His having shut up the kingdom of death by dying upon the tree of His cross? This tree it is which Jeremiah likewise gives you intimation of, when he prophesies to the Jews, who should say, 'Come, let us destroy the tree with the fruit, (the bread) thereof,' that is, His body. For so did God in your own gospel even reveal the sense, when He called His body bread; so that, for the time to come, you may understand that <b>He has given to His body the figure of bread</b>, whose body the prophet of old figuratively turned into bread, the Lord Himself designing to give by and by an interpretation of the mystery."
Here we see Tertullian referring to the body of Christ as a "figure of bread". clearly saying that the identification is not to be taken literally. In this whole passage, Tertullian argues against literalistic interpretations of several passages. One can surmise from his statements about the figurative nature of the bread being the body of Christ that Tertullian would not have held to the "real presence" doctrine. However, lest there be any doubt at this point, Tertullian speaks about this very subject at another point:
"He says, it is true, that 'the flesh profiteth nothing;' but then, as in the former case, the meaning must be regulated by the subject which is spoken of. Now, <b>because they thought His discourse was harsh and intolerable, supposing that He had really and literally enjoined on them to eat his flesh</b>, He, with the view of ordering the state of salvation as a spiritual thing, set out with the principle, 'It is the spirit that quickeneth; 'and then added, 'The flesh profiteth nothing,'-meaning, of course, to the giving of life. He also goes on to explain what He would have us to understand by spirit: 'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' In a like sense He had previously said: 'He that heareth my words, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but shall pass from death unto life.' <b>Constituting, therefore, His word as the life-giving principle, because that word is spirit and life, He likewise called His flesh by the same appellation; because, too, the Word had become flesh, we ought therefore to desire Him in order that we may have life, and to devour Him with the ear, and to ruminate on Him with the understanding, and to digest Him by faith.</b>"
I apologize for the length of this post, but I believe the information to be useful.
Shamms