Dining in the Dark: Is Communion Christ’s Flesh?
Jan 20, 2020 17:48:46 GMT -5
Post by Berean on Jan 20, 2020 17:48:46 GMT -5
Dining in the Dark: Is Communion Christ’s Flesh?
by Clint Archer
“Transubstantiation of the Eucharist” is terminology with which I was au fait by age ten. My family was decidedly Roman Catholic; my uncle had trained in theology at The Vatican, under Pope John Paul II. My dad was a minister of the Eucharist, which is to say he was one of the few men entrusted with the license to handle the body and blood of Christ during the mass.
As a kid, I enjoyed our weekly catechism classes more than most. I aced the dogma quizzes on communion: “Trans = change, thus transubstantiation is the mystical change of substance from bread to flesh.”
It was common for me to get the chills, moved with wonder, at the ethereal sound of the altar boy’s chimes, sounded at the precise moment at which the bread of communion changed substance into the body of Jesus. I was a card-carrying Catholic, a preteen company man.
Then I turned eleven.
For some reason, the reasonableness of my religion started to feel…incomplete. As a younger kid, there was much mystery in life I had unquestioningly imbibed like Kool-Aid. It never bothered me exactly how a fat man could fit down a chimney and repeat that feat a billion times in one night. As long as my parents believed it, and I got presents for being good, the logistics didn’t elicit any curiosity.
But by age eleven I had seen the bubble of my belief burst enough times to foster growing skepticism in my heart. With the devastating loss of the generous Tooth Fairy and the beloved Easter Bunny, came the growing loss of puerile credulity. It was the execution of my favorite Bible character, the Little Drummer Boy, that left me irrecoverably jaded. (See Should We Lie To Our Kids About Santa?)
As fantasy began to be stripped away by education and by being let in on the secret that it was all a harmless, playful hoax, the longing for the reasonableness of my beliefs grew.
One day I asked my catechism teacher, with a sincere desire to comprehend, whether I had correctly understood the teaching that we were to believe that the wheat communion wafer actually became the flesh of Jesus, and how that could be, since there is only so much meat on the bones of one man.
Though the inquiry must have sounded facetious it was handled with care to reinforce the doctrines that had been taught and believed by millions of people for two thousand years. What could an eleven-year-old boy know that the learned clergy didn’t? I felt like a character in The Emperor’s New Clothes faced with a decision of how much to say.
I furtively snuck off to get my priest’s take on things. I confessed my doubts and pleaded for help in understanding. Another seemingly facetious question ensued: “Father, just to get this straight, you’re telling me that if I took the wafer and put it under a microscope, I would see fibers of flesh instead of particles of wheat?”
The poor man was aghast as he saw in my eyes that his reply would likely be corroborated by the inevitable larceny of his communion wafers and the subsequent sacrilegious experiment. He explained with severity that conducting such a blasphemous display of doubt would cause the body to turn back into bread. Jesus said, “This is my body.” What else could that possibly mean? So just have faith in the interpretations taught for two thousand years. Got it.
Ten years later…
I was saved by hearing the gospel preached by a missionary, in an interdenominational campus chapel in South Africa. Our visiting preacher had covered the statue of Mary with a sheet. I kid you not. My Catholic sensibilities were more than a tad offended.
What followed was several weeks of expository sermons through Ephesians 2:1-10Open in Logos Bible Software (if available), which systematically dismantled one aspect of Catholic soteriology at a time, like an existential game of Jenga, until my increasingly precarious belief system came toppling down with the resonant thud of Protestant finality.
I bowed the knee to Christ and transferred the part of my faith that was leaning on my work, onto the person and work of Christ, and his grace. Alone.
Post tenebras lux! (After darkness, light!)
As I scoured my dog-eared copy of Vatican II, I held every piece of religious conviction I had learned up to the light of Scripture, like a suspicious cashier checking for counterfeit bills. The absence of any scriptural watermark left me with no confidence in the magisterium’s dogma. I decided to trust in Scripture alone.
The list of beliefs and practices I jettisoned was…comprehensive: veneration of saints, Papal infallibility, belief in the treasury of merit, the rites of confession and penance, genuflecting to the Eucharist, and belief in transubstantiation of the Eucharist, were some of the first to go.
The Protestant view of the Lord’s Supper: the bread we eat during communion is NOT the literal body of Jesus. Obviously.
The bread is a symbol of Christ’s body like the wine is a symbol of his blood. We partake in remembrance of his death, not as an act of sacrificing him again and again (Rom 6:10Open in Logos Bible Software (if available); Heb 9:26Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)).
I felt so liberated to discover theology that did not require me to hit the mute button on my mind. So the Emperor of transubstantiation was, in fact, unclothed. I knew it! I’m not a doubting Thomas after all.
Twenty years later…
The Evangelical, Protestant, Baptistic, Calvinistic, Francis Chan preaches…
“I want to recognize the body and blood of the Lord best I understand Scripture, best I understand everything and know that I am truly partaking of the body and blood of Christ somehow in some real way. Again, I am not making any like grand statements, I’m just saying, some of this stuff I didn’t know. I didn’t know that for the first 1500 years of church history everyone saw it as the literal body and blood of Christ and it wasn’t til 500 years ago that someone popularized a thought that it’s just a symbol, and nothing more. I didn’t know that, wow, that’s something to consider. …And for 1000 years there was just one church, did you know that? We’re so used to growing up in a time when literally there are over 30 000 Christian denominations right now. But for the first 1000 years there was just one. And what is interesting is that communion was at the center of the room every time they gathered.”
(Watch the video here, especially from 34:51- 41:07)
Wow indeed. That is something to consider. Let’s consider that.
First, it would require a spectacular ignorance of church history to say that there was one church for a thousand years (just ask any Greek Orthodox or Coptic Christian what they think of that statement) and that everybody believed that communion was Christ’s literal body. (See the enlightening history book, Long Before Luther by Dr. Nathan Busenitz).
Even if it were true, consistency would mandate that one similarly validate all the other mystical and unbiblical beliefs and practices of the many ignorant worshippers of the Dark Ages. What’s next, relic splinters of the cross?
Second, it belies a woeful ignorance of the conditions of the spiritual lives of the worshippers who believed this view. People believed in nonsense (I mean that in its technical definition, not as a pejorative insult) precisely because they didn’t have access to the Bible. This is what earned the Dark Age its moniker. The light of the knowledge of Scripture was unobtainable to the Latin-less laity.
We call mysterious sleight of hand of conjurers, “hocus-pocus.” That comes from the Latin formula intoned by every priest in every mass: Hoc es enim corpus meum, “This is my body.”
In the dark, people are forced to follow any person who claims to have the light. Superstition, blind faith in corrupt authorities, vulnerability to the abuses such as the sale of indulgences, and elevation of the clergy, are just some of the many shades of the Dark Ages that the Reformation ameliorated. This was the wonder of having the Bible translated into the language of the masses.
For a Protestant to crawl back into the darkness of mysticism is tantamount to second-guessing the graciousness of God’s enlightening work in the Reformation, and it is disrespectful to those who died to get the Scriptures in our languages.
Post tenebras lux, indeed.
It’s a very narrow view of hermeneutics that takes Christ’s statements “this is my body” (Luke 22:19Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)) and “whoever feeds on my flesh…” (John 6:54Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)) at that level of literalness. Jesus also said he was a door (John 10:7Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)). I doubt anyone believes his body had hinges and a peep-hole.
Chan continues…,
“It was at that same time, that for the first time, someone put a pulpit in the front of the gathering because before that it was always the body and blood of Christ that was central to their gatherings. For 1500 years it was never one guy and his pulpit being the center of the church, it was the body and blood of Christ and even the leaders just saw themselves as partakers, and oh man, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy.
…For the first 1000 years there was just one. And what is interesting is that communion was at the center of the room every time they gathered. And it wasn’t a pulpit where a guy preached after studying in his office by himself for 20 hours. See right now we’ve got guys like me that go in a room, study, you know, that’s what I was doing for years. Meanwhile other guys went in their rooms and studied and then we started to all giving different messages, so many contradicting each other and pretty soon it was I follow Piper, I follow Chan, I follow…you know it’s just like everyone’s following different guys.
I’m just saying I believe there was something about taking communion out of the center of the church and replace (sic) it with a gifted speaker. Not that that gifted speaker is not a part of the body of Christ, and a gift to the body of Christ, but the body itself needs to be back in the center of the church.”
Chan ties the Protestant rejection of the belief in communion as literal flesh to the advent of gifted men preaching the Bible. Well yes, precisely!
It was when the Bible started being explained to people, that the superstitions of Rome were summarily exorcised with screeching protestation from the faith and practice of formerly duped worshippers.
The reason people gathered for communion instead of preaching is because they had been taught eating Jesus’s flesh continually is what saves you and keeps you saved. We believe Jesus saves you by faith in a message (the gospel), which you need to hear, understand, and believe (Rom 10:13-15Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)).
They thought they were eating Christ’s flesh because they were dining in the dark!
I understand that Chan is striving for greater unity and that he is encouraging Christians to see themselves as part of the body of Christ. His heart seems to be in the right place.
But unfortunately, when your thoughts are heard by so many, there has to be great caution. One cannot cherry-pick the focus on communion from the first 1,500 years of Christianity and ignore the concurrent evil and oppression of the Roman Catholic church. We would never say that since the German trains were always punctual in the 1940s maybe we need to reconsider Nazi beliefs and practices.
We can’t cut biblical truth loose as if it were ballast slowing down our pursuit of unity. We can’t venerate a bygone era of oppressive and false teaching and try to emulate one of its practices and ignore the implications of that theology. The path to unity must be lit by the lamp of God’s word.
My hope is that Chan changes direction and comes back to the light, back to the Bible, and back to common sense.
link
by Clint Archer
“Transubstantiation of the Eucharist” is terminology with which I was au fait by age ten. My family was decidedly Roman Catholic; my uncle had trained in theology at The Vatican, under Pope John Paul II. My dad was a minister of the Eucharist, which is to say he was one of the few men entrusted with the license to handle the body and blood of Christ during the mass.
As a kid, I enjoyed our weekly catechism classes more than most. I aced the dogma quizzes on communion: “Trans = change, thus transubstantiation is the mystical change of substance from bread to flesh.”
It was common for me to get the chills, moved with wonder, at the ethereal sound of the altar boy’s chimes, sounded at the precise moment at which the bread of communion changed substance into the body of Jesus. I was a card-carrying Catholic, a preteen company man.
Then I turned eleven.
For some reason, the reasonableness of my religion started to feel…incomplete. As a younger kid, there was much mystery in life I had unquestioningly imbibed like Kool-Aid. It never bothered me exactly how a fat man could fit down a chimney and repeat that feat a billion times in one night. As long as my parents believed it, and I got presents for being good, the logistics didn’t elicit any curiosity.
But by age eleven I had seen the bubble of my belief burst enough times to foster growing skepticism in my heart. With the devastating loss of the generous Tooth Fairy and the beloved Easter Bunny, came the growing loss of puerile credulity. It was the execution of my favorite Bible character, the Little Drummer Boy, that left me irrecoverably jaded. (See Should We Lie To Our Kids About Santa?)
As fantasy began to be stripped away by education and by being let in on the secret that it was all a harmless, playful hoax, the longing for the reasonableness of my beliefs grew.
One day I asked my catechism teacher, with a sincere desire to comprehend, whether I had correctly understood the teaching that we were to believe that the wheat communion wafer actually became the flesh of Jesus, and how that could be, since there is only so much meat on the bones of one man.
Though the inquiry must have sounded facetious it was handled with care to reinforce the doctrines that had been taught and believed by millions of people for two thousand years. What could an eleven-year-old boy know that the learned clergy didn’t? I felt like a character in The Emperor’s New Clothes faced with a decision of how much to say.
I furtively snuck off to get my priest’s take on things. I confessed my doubts and pleaded for help in understanding. Another seemingly facetious question ensued: “Father, just to get this straight, you’re telling me that if I took the wafer and put it under a microscope, I would see fibers of flesh instead of particles of wheat?”
The poor man was aghast as he saw in my eyes that his reply would likely be corroborated by the inevitable larceny of his communion wafers and the subsequent sacrilegious experiment. He explained with severity that conducting such a blasphemous display of doubt would cause the body to turn back into bread. Jesus said, “This is my body.” What else could that possibly mean? So just have faith in the interpretations taught for two thousand years. Got it.
Ten years later…
I was saved by hearing the gospel preached by a missionary, in an interdenominational campus chapel in South Africa. Our visiting preacher had covered the statue of Mary with a sheet. I kid you not. My Catholic sensibilities were more than a tad offended.
What followed was several weeks of expository sermons through Ephesians 2:1-10Open in Logos Bible Software (if available), which systematically dismantled one aspect of Catholic soteriology at a time, like an existential game of Jenga, until my increasingly precarious belief system came toppling down with the resonant thud of Protestant finality.
I bowed the knee to Christ and transferred the part of my faith that was leaning on my work, onto the person and work of Christ, and his grace. Alone.
Post tenebras lux! (After darkness, light!)
As I scoured my dog-eared copy of Vatican II, I held every piece of religious conviction I had learned up to the light of Scripture, like a suspicious cashier checking for counterfeit bills. The absence of any scriptural watermark left me with no confidence in the magisterium’s dogma. I decided to trust in Scripture alone.
The list of beliefs and practices I jettisoned was…comprehensive: veneration of saints, Papal infallibility, belief in the treasury of merit, the rites of confession and penance, genuflecting to the Eucharist, and belief in transubstantiation of the Eucharist, were some of the first to go.
The Protestant view of the Lord’s Supper: the bread we eat during communion is NOT the literal body of Jesus. Obviously.
The bread is a symbol of Christ’s body like the wine is a symbol of his blood. We partake in remembrance of his death, not as an act of sacrificing him again and again (Rom 6:10Open in Logos Bible Software (if available); Heb 9:26Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)).
I felt so liberated to discover theology that did not require me to hit the mute button on my mind. So the Emperor of transubstantiation was, in fact, unclothed. I knew it! I’m not a doubting Thomas after all.
Twenty years later…
The Evangelical, Protestant, Baptistic, Calvinistic, Francis Chan preaches…
“I want to recognize the body and blood of the Lord best I understand Scripture, best I understand everything and know that I am truly partaking of the body and blood of Christ somehow in some real way. Again, I am not making any like grand statements, I’m just saying, some of this stuff I didn’t know. I didn’t know that for the first 1500 years of church history everyone saw it as the literal body and blood of Christ and it wasn’t til 500 years ago that someone popularized a thought that it’s just a symbol, and nothing more. I didn’t know that, wow, that’s something to consider. …And for 1000 years there was just one church, did you know that? We’re so used to growing up in a time when literally there are over 30 000 Christian denominations right now. But for the first 1000 years there was just one. And what is interesting is that communion was at the center of the room every time they gathered.”
(Watch the video here, especially from 34:51- 41:07)
Wow indeed. That is something to consider. Let’s consider that.
First, it would require a spectacular ignorance of church history to say that there was one church for a thousand years (just ask any Greek Orthodox or Coptic Christian what they think of that statement) and that everybody believed that communion was Christ’s literal body. (See the enlightening history book, Long Before Luther by Dr. Nathan Busenitz).
Even if it were true, consistency would mandate that one similarly validate all the other mystical and unbiblical beliefs and practices of the many ignorant worshippers of the Dark Ages. What’s next, relic splinters of the cross?
Second, it belies a woeful ignorance of the conditions of the spiritual lives of the worshippers who believed this view. People believed in nonsense (I mean that in its technical definition, not as a pejorative insult) precisely because they didn’t have access to the Bible. This is what earned the Dark Age its moniker. The light of the knowledge of Scripture was unobtainable to the Latin-less laity.
We call mysterious sleight of hand of conjurers, “hocus-pocus.” That comes from the Latin formula intoned by every priest in every mass: Hoc es enim corpus meum, “This is my body.”
In the dark, people are forced to follow any person who claims to have the light. Superstition, blind faith in corrupt authorities, vulnerability to the abuses such as the sale of indulgences, and elevation of the clergy, are just some of the many shades of the Dark Ages that the Reformation ameliorated. This was the wonder of having the Bible translated into the language of the masses.
For a Protestant to crawl back into the darkness of mysticism is tantamount to second-guessing the graciousness of God’s enlightening work in the Reformation, and it is disrespectful to those who died to get the Scriptures in our languages.
Post tenebras lux, indeed.
It’s a very narrow view of hermeneutics that takes Christ’s statements “this is my body” (Luke 22:19Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)) and “whoever feeds on my flesh…” (John 6:54Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)) at that level of literalness. Jesus also said he was a door (John 10:7Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)). I doubt anyone believes his body had hinges and a peep-hole.
Chan continues…,
“It was at that same time, that for the first time, someone put a pulpit in the front of the gathering because before that it was always the body and blood of Christ that was central to their gatherings. For 1500 years it was never one guy and his pulpit being the center of the church, it was the body and blood of Christ and even the leaders just saw themselves as partakers, and oh man, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy, we’re not worthy.
…For the first 1000 years there was just one. And what is interesting is that communion was at the center of the room every time they gathered. And it wasn’t a pulpit where a guy preached after studying in his office by himself for 20 hours. See right now we’ve got guys like me that go in a room, study, you know, that’s what I was doing for years. Meanwhile other guys went in their rooms and studied and then we started to all giving different messages, so many contradicting each other and pretty soon it was I follow Piper, I follow Chan, I follow…you know it’s just like everyone’s following different guys.
I’m just saying I believe there was something about taking communion out of the center of the church and replace (sic) it with a gifted speaker. Not that that gifted speaker is not a part of the body of Christ, and a gift to the body of Christ, but the body itself needs to be back in the center of the church.”
Chan ties the Protestant rejection of the belief in communion as literal flesh to the advent of gifted men preaching the Bible. Well yes, precisely!
It was when the Bible started being explained to people, that the superstitions of Rome were summarily exorcised with screeching protestation from the faith and practice of formerly duped worshippers.
The reason people gathered for communion instead of preaching is because they had been taught eating Jesus’s flesh continually is what saves you and keeps you saved. We believe Jesus saves you by faith in a message (the gospel), which you need to hear, understand, and believe (Rom 10:13-15Open in Logos Bible Software (if available)).
They thought they were eating Christ’s flesh because they were dining in the dark!
I understand that Chan is striving for greater unity and that he is encouraging Christians to see themselves as part of the body of Christ. His heart seems to be in the right place.
But unfortunately, when your thoughts are heard by so many, there has to be great caution. One cannot cherry-pick the focus on communion from the first 1,500 years of Christianity and ignore the concurrent evil and oppression of the Roman Catholic church. We would never say that since the German trains were always punctual in the 1940s maybe we need to reconsider Nazi beliefs and practices.
We can’t cut biblical truth loose as if it were ballast slowing down our pursuit of unity. We can’t venerate a bygone era of oppressive and false teaching and try to emulate one of its practices and ignore the implications of that theology. The path to unity must be lit by the lamp of God’s word.
My hope is that Chan changes direction and comes back to the light, back to the Bible, and back to common sense.
link
