The Eucharist
How
I got this way
Chris Robinson
From
the Editor
Marcus Grodi
Affirming
All Things
Dwight Longnecker
The
Real Presence
David Palm
Transubtantation
and the Eucharist
David Armstron
But
What do we Mean by "The Real Presence"?
Dwight Longnecker
St.
Augustine's Belief in the Real Presence
David Armstrong
The
Holy Eucharist
James Cardinal
Gibbons
The
Meal of Melkizedek
Scott Hahn Ph.D.
One
Step Enough
A Short History
of the St. Barnabas Society
Before
You Object...
Marcus Grodi
The
Eucharist in the Economy of Salvation
Other Journals
Before You Object...
By Marcus C. Grodi
In my own journey of faith, the Lord has brought me through a wide range of Christian traditions which each had a different view of the Lord’s Supper. I was baptized, catechized and confirmed a Lutheran, so was basically weaned on the Lutheran view of Consubstantiation.
The first Sunday of every month, we came forward and knelt at the front altar to receive a piece of cubed bread and drink wine from individual small cups. I vaguely remember being taught that this was truly Jesus, but I honestly don’t remember taking the Sacrament very seriously. It was more a Rite of Passage for me—I became a full-fledged member of the church, an adult. But I don’t think it ever hit me that it was truly Jesus that I was receiving.
After leaving the Lutheran church for several years in college, I had an adult conversion experience as a Congregationalist, where, again once a month we celebrated the Lord’s supper, but here we passed plates of cubed bread and small cups of juice. This was merely a memorial meal in which we celebrated Christ’s sacrifice for our sins. There was no implication whatsoever that Jesus was truly present in the bread and juice but he was there in our hearts through the presence of the Holy Spirit.
At the interdenominational, Evangelical seminary I attended, our classes taught the various views as essentially equal rather than putting weight on any particular one, primarily because there were so many different positions held by the more than 30 different denominations represented.
Later as an ordained Presbyterian minister we celebrated the Table of the Lord much like we had as Congregationalists, except that Jesus was there in a very unique way because of our faith, and communicants received him in a unique way when they partook of the cubed bread and juice through their faith.
As I reread these articles featured in this edition of the CHJournal, trying to hear them again as those of you from other traditions might be hearing them, several things crossed my mind. First, that it is much more clear to me now than it was before how confusing and contradictory the great variety of views are that have arisen since the Reformation. Before the Reformation there was really only one view which had been quasi-unanimously accepted for fifteen hundred years by Christians in all ages, in all languages, in all cultures, at all times. Since the Reformation there have arisen so many different views that the end result is that amongst non-Catholic Christians, the Lord’s Supper is really not all that important. My challenge to any non-Catholic Christians reading this journal is to examine closely the history of this Sacrament. Read a book like "The Hidden Manna" by James T. O’Connor1, which gives a detailed history of how the Eucharist has been understood from the beginning. Examine the primary sources of the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity. What you will find among many things, is that the Eucharist has always been considered an essential center of Christian worship and life.
Secondly, in trying to remember the gist of some of the arguments I used to believe and teach against the Catholic view of Transubstantiation, I checked a few of my old Systematic Theology books. In each case the authors gave similar arguments, but one in particular which they presumed made the Catholic literal view a mute point. For instance, here is the brief argument given by L. Berhkof, the preferred Systematic Theology text from my Evangelical seminary:
The Church of Rome makes the copula ‘is’ emphatic. Jesus meant to say that what He held in His hands was really His body, though it looked and tasted like bread. But this is a thoroughly untenable position. In all probability Jesus spoke Aramaic and used no copula at all. And while He stood before the disciples in the body, He could not very well say to His disciples in all seriousness that He held His body in His hand. Moreover, even on the Roman Catholic view, He could not truthfully say, "This is my body," but could only say, "This is now becoming my body." (Systematic Theology, Wm. .B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI., 1939; pg. 649).
Thou I once hung on every word written by Professor Berkhof, it is now interesting to recognize how quickly and matter-of-factly he wrote off nearly 2000 years of consistent Catholic testimony as "thoroughly untenable" in but three sentences. First, it is true that both the Hebrew and Aramaic languages do not use a word for the present tense "to be," or in this case "is." However, giving Professor Berkhof the benefit of the doubt and presuming he was much too busy and pressed to check his sources, anyone who has taken Hebrew knows that though this is true, it doesn’t mean what Berkhof and others conclude. The truth is that in clauses, such as "David is King," or "This is my body," where the present tense only uses juxtaposed nouns or demonstrative pronouns, the "is" is very strongly presumed; it is only with other tenses, such as past or future, where a specific form of the "to be" verb is added. Berkhof and others have made a false theological conclusion out of a grammatical construct. We find a similar presumption in certain English constructions, such as when we say, "Butch is my dog, and Rover, too." We don’t need to say "is" in the second clause to know it is there; the same was true in the Hebrew and Aramaic constructions.
I find it also interesting, and again I give them the benefit of busyness and pressed deadlines, but some of the same anti-Catholic authors who make the above claim, also hang their hat on the distinctions in the Greek of Matthew 16.18, failing to mention that the same Aramaic that Jesus would have spoken had only one word for "rock" = "kepha." Therefore, their emphasis on "Thou art Peter (Petros, masculine = small pebble) and on this rock (Petra, feminine = rock)" is really "thoroughly untenable."
In the second two sentences of Professor Berkhof’s disclaimer, he is really basing his argument on a weak form of rationalism, which carries no particular weight or authority; it is merely his opinion. A similar argument could be made for lots of miraculous things: "This can’t be God standing before me," A first century Jew may have exclaimed. "God is omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient, yet you say this dirty, sweaty Galilean man standing before me, who bleeds and weeps and doesn’t know the time of his Second Coming is God? You can not be serious!"
I hope you’ve been open to hearing from the previous articles that the Roman Catholic belief in the Real Presence of the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, is a reasonable conclusion from the most literal interpretation of Sacred Scripture, from the witness of the Apostles and the Early Church Fathers, and the Faithful Catholic teachers throughout the centuries. And that it is a dogma of Faith that we accept by Faith, not because we have faith in philosophy and reason, but because we believe in the words of Jesus: that He gave His Holy Spirit to the Church to lead Her into all truth, and that the gates of Hell would not prevail against Her. We believe it is possible because we simply believe that all things are possible with God. And we also believe, as it states in Proverbs 3.5,6, that we cannot "lean unto our own understanding," for we may find, that through our busyness and our pressed deadlines, that we have merely accepted the opinions of other busy people, and been wrong.
I pray that this journal has been an encouragement to your faith. If it has raised any questions or concerns, please contact us, or the person who gave you this journal. Our desire is not to proselytize but to help you grow closer to Christ and to discover the rich fullness of Christian Truth in the Catholic Christ, and in the process, become more like Christ in holiness.
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