Why do so many Christians not believe Jesus's plain words

TuxAme said:

The disciples said it themselves: this is a hard saying, who can listen to it?

Not everyone who says Lord, Lord will be saved, and I would imagine that one reason for it is that not everyone who says Lord, Lord will accept this hard saying.

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I don't think salvation depends transubstantiation or consubstantiation.

Mary Meg said:

Others can speak much better to where these less-than-plain interpretations got started... But speaking as somebody who grew up reading Scripture this way -- it's what I was taught. And what my parents were taught. And what my grandparents and their parents were taught. People get caught up in their interpretive traditions and -- especially in past generations -- may never encounter any other view.

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We shouldn't negate the fact that most people here grew up in nations dominated by a Protestant patrimony (and of the relatively Puritan or Pietist sort that never particularly had much interest in sacramental realism), of course we are going to think memorialism is a natural interpretation. I grew up in the same type of situation in a Methodist church, especially before liturgical renewal was much of a thing. Many Methodists were simply somewhat more liberal "wet-baby Baptists", in my experience. A Presbyterian chaplain was my first experience of something deeper, and perhaps the first place I started getting an inkling that communion was more than just some kind of empty ritual. She talked about God in a deeper way than shallow moralism and sentimentality, as well.

Speaking for me -- whenever I read those passages growing up, and John 6, it was like I had blinders: I read what I had always heard -- that it was symbolic -- and never noticed the disconnect -- that nothing in the passages actually implies that it's symbolic. I was really taken aback when I came back and read those passages for the first time after learning about the Catholic view...

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Yes, that's how I read it too. For me it really took a deconstruction of that whole worldview to be able to appreciate anything else. And I read the apostolic fathers as a teenager, around age 18, and I realized they weren't exactly on the same page as what I had been taught. By that time, I just assumed the Church was a dead thing because Ignatius didn't exactly look like Rome or Protestantism, and I became irreligious some time afterwards. And my Methodist pastor simply was too liberal to be of much help, I reckoned. I doubted he knew or cared about those sorts of questions.

James Murphy said:

That's very common in EVERY church. I remember hearing a Calvinist pastor comment that he believed only 10-20% of his congregation were actually saved Christians.

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This is very true. Oh, how I wish people of every church would live up to their confessions.

David Cabrera said:

Because donatism is a heresy.

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So the leaders who decide what things are heresy are the same one's who say their personal lives don't matter when ministering communion. That's pretty convenient!

That rule certainly would not work in the OT temple of Jerusalem. It also seems to be the opposite of everything Jesus modeled on Earth.

No Username Found said:

Jesus also said that He is the bread of life (John 6:35). Does this then mean that Jesus was a pastry?

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That's how the early Church understood him. We shouldn't see that as an either/or thing, either (purely spiritual vs. sacramental communion).

Peter J Barban said:

So the leaders who decide what things are heresy are the same one's who say their personal lives don't matter when ministering communion. That's pretty convenient!

That rule certainly would not work in the OT temple of Jerusalem. It also seems to be the opposite of everything Jesus modeled on Earth.

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It's about being able to trust in Christ's presence in the sacrament and not the person administering it. People fail you, God does not. Don't be so cynical, really, it's not healthy. Not everything is a big conspiracy.

Jesus said people were "evil" (Matthew 7:11), he called Peter "Satan" (Matthew 16:23), but he still made them his apostles and entrusted them with his mission. It seems to me Jesus did not in fact use the logic you suggested.

1. I have given communion at several Protestant Christian gatherings. Is Christ equally present in our bread?

2. Paul warned the Church to examine themselves and not eat the body of Christ in an unworthy manner. He even implied that God was punishing people who did so. Why does the life of the priest escape such judgment? Shouldn't the standard for the one who performs the sacrament be as high or higher than the one who receives it?

Jipsah said:

Then why didn't our Lord clarify it for the many who misunderstood it, including the apostles?

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He did ... for those who stayed long enough to hear ...

John 6

59 He said these things teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. 60 Therefore many of His disciples having heard, said, “This word is difficult; who is able to hear it?”

61 But Jesus, knowing in Himself that His disciples are grumbling about this, said to them, “Does this offend you? 62 Then what if you should see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before?

63 It is the Spirit which gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life.

FireDragon76 said:

We shouldn't negate the fact that most people here grew up in nations dominated by a Protestant patrimony (and of the relatively Puritan or Pietist sort that never particularly had much interest in sacramental realism), of course we are going to think memorialism is a natural interpretation.

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Guided to such by Christ's own words ...

"Do this in remembrance of Me." Luke 22:19

A_Thinker said:

Guided to such by Christ's own words ...

"Do this in remembrance of Me." Luke 22:19

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Lutherans do believe it is a memorial and we are not averse to such language, but we understand that in the sense that ancient people did, as a participation in something made present. We do not understand it through the Enlightenment's presuppositions about what that means.

As I've pointed out before, your arguments are really not that different from Unitarians and Deists, who had similar objections to all Christian truth claims that ultimately rested on God's mysteries.

Jesus is the Bread of Life. Just as bread nourishes our physical bodies, Jesus gives and sustains eternal life to all believers. John 6:35 - "I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst." As He was accustomed, Jesus used figurative language to emphasize these spiritual truths. Jesus explains the sense of the entire passage when He says in John 6:63 - "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life."

The literal interpretation literally eating flesh and literally drinking blood is absurd. By faith we partake of Christ, and the benefits of His bodily sacrifice on the cross and shed blood, receiving and enjoying eternal life. Eating and drinking is not literal here (cannibalism) but the reception of God’s grace by believing in Christ, as He makes clear by repeating the same truths in metaphoric and plain language below:

John 6:40 - Everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:54 - Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:47 - Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.

John 6:58 - He who eats this bread will live forever.

"He who believes" in Christ is equivalent to "he who eats this bread and drinks My blood" because the result is the same, eternal life.

John 6 does not afford any support to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. On the contrary, it is on the primacy of faith as the means by which we receive the grace of God. Jesus is the Bread of Life; we eat of Him and are satisfied when we believe in Him.

Bread represents the "staff of life." Sustenance. That which essential to sustain life. Just as bread or sustenance is necessary to maintain physical life, Jesus is all the sustenance necessary for spiritual life.

The source of physical life is blood -- "life is in the blood." As with the bread, just as blood is the empowering or source of life physically, Jesus is all the source of spiritual life necessary.

godenver1 said:

When He says "this is my body"? What is there to misinterpret?.

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Perhaps it's the loving, humble demeanour of those who present this doctrine that repels people from it. God Bless

lismore said:

Perhaps it's the loving, humble demeanour of those who present this doctrine that repels people from it. God Bless

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Or maybe its more about how we try to teach our youth our doctrine and we live in a culture that actively scoffs at the notion of sacramental realism (including other Christians) that we are so defensive? Ultimately, for a Lutheran this issue is inherently pastoral. We don't set out to tell Baptists and other evangelicals their religion is worthless because they don't agree with our doctrine (in fact I think that's really a kind of aggressive proselytism, and it's wrong), but we don't appreciate it when people tell us that we don't know Jesus because we engage in "empty rituals".

I've had Baptist missionaries come to my door and tell me that going to a Lutheran church is not good enough because maybe I don't know Jesus. That's just silly. I have supper with him every week. We simply do not need evangelicals help on this issue to clarify anything.

godenver1 said:

When He says "this is my body"? What is there to misinterpret?

Edit: I wish I could change the title. Maybe it's too contentious. Forgive me.

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It is sometimes said that the people who quickly drifted away after that would have assumed Jesus was talking about cannibalism - an accusation against Christians apparently made against Christians by pagans in the early days.

However, what I find interesting about this is that Jesus could have explained what he meant (and was, in a sense, foretelling), but he chose not to. My impression is that they were the more intellectual rabbinical types, synagogue worthiess, who took Jesus' words at (materialistic) face-value, and concluded that he was a 'nutter', an idiot, moreover ; an itinerant, maverick preacher, virtually in his own words, a vagrant.

On the other hand, who were the types who stayed, and continued to listen to Jesus' words, if not his beloved Anawim and his devout, though less numerous middle-class types ? The kind of people who, without a professional axe to grind, and possessed, like children (to which he sometimes compared them), of total intellectual integrity, (keen to find out the truth about everything),would have thought to themselves something along the lines of :

'Well we've seen and listened to this man for long enough to 'cut him some slack' here, not for his benefit, but ours. He'll surely explain it to us later.

How much good have we seen him do, miracles of healing even and casting out devils, and how much more in line with the scriptures are his sermons, warning against compromising with the World to enrich ourselves at the expense of the poor - an imbalance that persists in the Christian church to this day, since its clerical and episcopal hierarchy have long, primarily, been the preserve of the monied, middle* and upper classes.

For those who doubt the paradoxically mysterious truth, albeit, seemingly oxymoronic, you should watch the YouTube video-clip of the exposition of a Sacred Host in a church in Argentina that having turned into flesh and blood, when examined by cardiologists and other specialist physicians, was discovered to be taken from a human heart. But the thing is you can see it throbbing in a most eerie way.** I think it was said that it was of AB* type, and showed signs torture.

In short, Jesus was happy to 'sort the men from the boys' in that way, presumably even anticipating the departure of the faithless 'know-alls'.

*In the sense of the class-milieu of Agatha Christie's central characters, for example.
** I couldn't find that clip just now, and don't have the time to go through all the clips on that and similar miracles, but this one should knock the socks off anyone. It concerns the same miracle. Pope Francies was involved in having it medically examined.

FireDragon76 said:

God's mysteries

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The ol' mystery ploy. Nothing mysterious about Jesus' Gospel of the Kingdom and His two commandments. Plenty mysterious about religion.

FireDragon76 said:

Or maybe its more about how we try to teach our youth our doctrine

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Doctrine first, Jesus' Kingdom second? I guess indoctrination is important to build congregations. Jesus can always be taught later. So that makes sense. I no longer have congregations. People just go their separate ways and plant the seeds given them.

FireDragon

It comes down to these words from John ...

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

People who are truly living Christ's words ... will not be 'of this world'. Notice that John is not talking about what people do on Sunday morning. He is talking about what they do ... for all of the rest of the time from Monday to Saturday.

I will stand by my own common sense. I saw far too much hypocrisy in the Catholic Church. But as I said, it did not come from the doctine of the church itself but rather that people were repeating ritualized motions. And I did not say that all Catholics do this .. I believe that some are sincerely following Christ.

Likewise for Protestants. Jesus' standards do not change, regardless of the name of a church.

When Ignatius and Polycarp went to die in Rome, they knew what they were doing and why. Eating pieces of bread that were 'transubstantiated' into Christ's body had nothing to do with it. Living a daily life that was obedient to Christ had everyrhing to do with it.

Danthemailman said:

Jesus is the Bread of Life. Just as bread nourishes our physical bodies, Jesus gives and sustains eternal life to all believers. John 6:35 - "I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst." As He was accustomed, Jesus used figurative language to emphasize these spiritual truths. Jesus explains the sense of the entire passage when He says in John 6:63 - "It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life."

The literal interpretation literally eating flesh and literally drinking blood is absurd. By faith we partake of Christ, and the benefits of His bodily sacrifice on the cross and shed blood, receiving and enjoying eternal life. Eating and drinking is not literal here (cannibalism) but the reception of God’s grace by believing in Christ, as He makes clear by repeating the same truths in metaphoric and plain language below:

John 6:40 - Everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:54 - Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 6:47 - Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life.

John 6:58 - He who eats this bread will live forever.

"He who believes" in Christ is equivalent to "he who eats this bread and drinks My blood" because the result is the same, eternal life.

John 6 does not afford any support to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. On the contrary, it is on the primacy of faith as the means by which we receive the grace of God. Jesus is the Bread of Life; we eat of Him and are satisfied when we believe in Him.

Bread represents the "staff of life." Sustenance. That which essential to sustain life. Just as bread or sustenance is necessary to maintain physical life, Jesus is all the sustenance necessary for spiritual life.

The source of physical life is blood -- "life is in the blood." As with the bread, just as blood is the empowering or source of life physically, Jesus is all the source of spiritual life necessary.

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Yep. Eating and drinking natural bread and wine and thinking nice holy thoughts about God doesn't make us grow spiritually. The only thing to do that is spiritual bread(the word) and spiritual wine(drinking of the life of the Holy Spirit). What a lot of arguing over a man made tradition. Traditions are just peer pressure from dead people.

Der Alter said:

Where was Jesus' actual, literal body when He held up the cup and the bread?

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Right, He was just kidding.

Peter J Barban said:

1. I have given communion at several Protestant Christian gatherings. Is Christ equally present in our bread?

2. Paul warned the Church to examine themselves and not eat the body of Christ in an unworthy manner. He even implied that God was punishing people who did so. Why does the life of the priest escape such judgment? Shouldn't the standard for the one who performs the sacrament be as high or higher than the one who receives it?

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So you think it's great that if a priest baptizes you but he was sinning, then the baptism doesn't count?