tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5596708332568087278.post7431746663048128100..comments2024-01-24T10:39:27.668-05:00Comments on Coming Untrue: Flesh and SpiritDr. S. L. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06303707167715370504noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5596708332568087278.post-2725424967477764742019-02-15T12:12:35.929-05:002019-02-15T12:12:35.929-05:00Hi IC, I think you made the same points in a prior...Hi IC, I think you made the same points in a prior append here someplace. We simply disagree in that I interpret it so that there is no ambiguity that the first Eucharist in it's full context was being handed out at the last supper. I do not think that God was/is bound by our timeline so that the reality of his body/blood could not be present then since he said so. As I said, claiming it to be a metaphor makes it trivial and really unnecessary otherwise. The Catholic Church thinks that the Eucharist has a practical purpose in that it constitutes a spiritual medicine to aid the believer on a very personal level in his/her relationship with our creator. Also, you must, in all fairness, deal with the reality of miraculous events of the Eucharist being shown as genuine throughout history and especially nowadays when it has been verified scientifically as genuine. To avoid that would imply shortchanging your creator and avoiding a totally verifyable (and already verified) but inconvenient (for Protestants) truth. So, please make the effort and take issue with the scientists and religious who have reported it to be the real thing and content with them concerning their observations and physical analysis.<br />Qmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5596708332568087278.post-88151983279299649072019-02-15T00:08:00.315-05:002019-02-15T00:08:00.315-05:00We have to be very careful not to mistake a metaph...We have to be very careful not to mistake a metaphor for a literality. When Christ said, “I am the door,” he was not saying he was made out of wood. When John calls him “the Lamb of God”, John is not implying he had wool. To mistake a metaphor for a literality wouldn’t be an evidence of extra-careful thinking, but rather of literary naivete. <br />We can check the original Greek emphasis. And what we find is this: that the emphasis in the original manuscripts, if it is anywhere, is perhaps on the word “remembrance”. We find there that the word “this”, in 1 Cor. 11:24 is actually an ordinary pronoun found in the middle of the sentence structure. It seems it has no special emphasis in the original language. One would have a hard time making any case for emphasizing it at all.<br /><br />But let us suppose you’re right to call the “THIS” the important emphasis in the passage. If we grant that, then you’d have to say that what it meant was not transubstantiation. And why not? It’s because when the Lord said “THIS”, his body and blood were manifestly not on the table, but entirely together in his own bodily presence, at that moment. He had not yet been crucified, his blood had not been spilled and his flesh had not been broken. So, very clearly, he was speaking of the bread and wine as symbols for his flesh and blood, with a view to them memorializing (the important emphasis) what he was about to do — NOT as if he were calling them literal bits of him. <br /><br />One can see the same thing in his dialogue with the Jewish followers in John 6. There, the followers clearly think he means his literal “flesh” (John 6:52) but very evidently he does not. And their refusal to see beyond the literal is testimony to their lack of understanding, and to their lack of real faith. <br />On balance, then, one would have to conclude that the Protestants actually have it right, as the transubstantiation doctrine is unsupportable from Scripture.<br />Immanuel Canhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11580529966007662214noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5596708332568087278.post-53166242895700134062019-02-13T10:38:53.576-05:002019-02-13T10:38:53.576-05:00When Christ said at the last supper "do this ...When Christ said at the last supper "do this in memory of me" the emphasis clearly was on the word THIS and memory only gave the timeline when to do it, namely after his death. And "This" would have been totally trivial if he did not also mean for them to do the "This" in it's completeness as just demonstrated, namely, the transformation of bread and wine into the first Eucharist. Since the idea of the Eucharist may be distasteful to many (I myself, as a Catholic, have been accused on this site by a commentator to be committing cannibalism) it is clear that personal convenience dictates to discard or modify distasteful facts. And I think that is where much of Protestantism has simply gotten stuck and avoids this inconvenient fact by placing the importance wrongly on the word memory instead of on the all encompassing THIS. It seems however that God has decided to counter that since he prolificly throughout history, and continuing to this very day, has showered us with numerous Eucharistic Miracles in the Catholic Church that, with solid scientific investigation, confirm the transubstantiation of the Eucharistic host into human tissue (e.g., into the heart muscle of a young male from the Near East region who had been tortured as the (blind study) scientific analysis describes for the Buenos Aires Eucharistic miracle). Btw, after the atheist scientist was told what he had been analysing he became a Catholic. The most recent two miracles making headlines just now occurred in Poland and two Polish Authors just published a book on the latest verified 50 Eucharistic miracles in recent times. Anyone can easily verify this for themselves with a Web search for Eucharistic Miracles. But again it may be very inconvenient to have ones firmly held preconceived notions upset and the first line of defense will probably be to not research this or, if so, to accuse the Catholic Church and/or the scientific investigators of deception and/or incompetence.<br />Qmannoreply@blogger.com