Is the Eucharist cannibalism?

Xeno.of.athens said:

A falling away from the faith - meaning, of course, the Catholic faith.

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The catholic faith is not the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ which is saving faith.

In the not too distant future we'll see who ends up where, so it's no problem at all

• Hildebert de Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours, is credited with using the term in the 11th century.

It is a teaching from the Roman Catholic Church that was manufactured from their tradition and mysticism. (personal observation). The OP brings up the conundrum with the teaching that has been an issue for the last 1000 years or so.

IF the teaching is accurate then undeniably the person is eating human flesh and drinking human blood - which by definition is cannibalism.

on the other hand

IF the teaching is in error - there is not way to undo the subsequent teachings and tradition the Roman Catholic church built around it.

RocK Guy said:

Not true. Communion is done in remembrance of the Lord and the grape juice and the bread just represent the Body and Blood of the Lord.

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Your teaching is not found in the Bible.

Xeno.of.athens said:

Hmmm, not compatible with what you say it teaches.

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This seems to be the problem with Protestant fundamentalists in general. They think only their interpretation of the Bible just happens to be the correct one, and it's the Catholics or "liberals" that have got it wrong.

If Christianity is declining in the western world, it must partly be due to this kind of widespread lack of intellectual integrity.

FireDragon76 said:

Our culture isn't monolithic like that, we live in a pluralistic society where people are free to disagree about matters of religion or things of ultimate value.

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3.7 is enough of a population size to threaten to tilt our society into disaster. Far less than 1% of Russians were Bolsheviks at the start of 1917, but dissatisfaction with the Provisional Government was all it took to empower their fringe movement, when they called for all power to be transferred to each local soviet with the retrospectively ironic slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” Alas if only more Russians had realized what that actually meant, that being all power to a Bolshevik political nomenklatura.

hislegacy said:

• Hildebert de Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours, is credited with using the term in the 11th century.

It is a teaching from the Roman Catholic Church that was manufactured from their tradition and mysticism. (personal observation). The OP brings up the conundrum with the teaching that has been an issue for the last 1000 years or so.

IF the teaching is accurate then undeniably the person is eating human flesh and drinking human blood - which by definition is cannibalism.

on the other hand

IF the teaching is in error - there is not way to undo the subsequent teachings and tradition the Roman Catholic church built around it.

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With using what term?

Also how is it cannibalism when our Lord is both fully God and fully Human? We know that we partake of his divine nature because the Holy Apostle Peter literally says as much.

It would only be an act of cannibalism if we ate His unresurrected body and blood, which would be impossible for they were finite, although still unified to the divine essence. But in rising from the dead His human nature was glorified, and we attained access to that glory ourselves.

So sad that people who call themselves Christian have an overwhelming need to destroy the faith of others; a faith that was taught to the Apostles, and maintained by the Apostolic Churches to this day. The faithful celebration of the Eucharist not only is a means of grace but a physical sign that our Lord remains with His Church forever. On the other hand, trying to destroy, demean and even shame those who hold this faith is not a show of faith, but a sign of the Antichrist. The eucharist Christ, it points to Christ. The idolatrous following of false prophets such as EGW and the attempts to destroy the faith of others is deplorable.

There, I said it. If the Eucharist is fair game for attack, then those who attack the Eucharist are also.

I will follow the Lord and the teaching of the apostles rather than apostates.

I'm done here.

I wish I could be surprised that this thread has lasted a dozen pages, but instead I am going to choose to look at it as yet another very telling example of what can happen when a believer (knowingly or unknowingly) unmoors themselves from the very basics of our faith: That Christ our God is truly God and truly Man; that He instituted for us this great mystery of Godliness in which we may participate, in accordance with the word as recorded in the scriptures and of course also in the life of the Church itself (of which the scriptures form an integral part, while never being "above" the Church; that view makes no sense, since the scriptures themselves are the writings of the very same Church!), that we become "partakers in the divine nature."

I do not know what there is left to believe in once all of these things and more are handwaved away because they are associated with a religious faction that you do not personally care for or see as being as faithful as you yourself are. In an analogous way to how the scriptures tell us that if Christ is not risen, then our faith is false and we are still dead in our sins, we can perhaps say that if Christ is not truly in our midst in the holy liturgy during which we approach communion with fear and trembling (as befits working out our salvation), then we might very well wonder if He is present anywhere.

And, yes, I hated typing that. But this is where we are with those who reject the basics of the Christian faith. Christ is risen unless you don't like the implications for what we actually believe and do, I suppose, and yet these people who have nothing and confuse their spiritual starvation with enlightenment see themselves as fit to tell everyone else what's wrong with whatever it is they're doing or believing that the spiritual anorexic does not like.

Go have yourself a sandwich and a think. We will share the orban/antidoron with you, as we are glad to do with everyone, but you'll have to show up to get it first. Being 'right' on the internet is no substitute for that, and I have a feeling that a great many people who reflexively dismiss anything liturgical or sacramental as Roman Catholic hooey on internet forums like CF will be very surprised when they show up to a Church that has had nothing to do with Roman Catholicism for almost 2,000 years and yet find many of the practices there similar enough to be suspicious of, yet different enough to be curious about. And on that we will build a cordial relationship and maybe something eternal, should God will it. You don't know what you could be rejecting if you are unwilling to get your hands dirty for the sake of Christ, and the Christian faith in all its beautiful paradox and messiness, and all of its pure and holy transformation and deification.

concretecamper said:

In other words, a miracle.

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Good day,

Nope

Miracle: an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

Physical Contradictions—Conflict between Two Desired Values for One Parameter

Nonsense- something that makes no -sense, (syn)- foolishness

I hope that helps.

In HIm,

Bill

Xeno.of.athens said:

Saint Peter will have the keys to the kingdom of God.

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Good day, XOA

That would be your understanding....

And we know that the Roman catholic denomination has it's own:



Roman Catholic scholar Yves Congar wrote:


"But it does sometimes happen that some Fathers understood a passage in a way which does not agree with later Church teaching. One example: the interpretation of Peter's confession in Matthew 16.16-19. Except at Rome, this passage was not applied by the Fathers to the papal primacy; they worked out an exegesis at the level of their own ecclesiological thought, more anthropological and spiritual than juridical. This instance, selected from a number of similar ones, shows first that the Fathers cannot be isolated from the Church and its life. They are great, but the Church surpasses them in age, as also by the breadth and richness of its experience. It is the Church, not the Fathers, the consensus of the Church in submission to its Saviour which is the sufficient rule of our Christianity....Historical documentation is at the factual level; it must leave room for a judgement made not in the light of the documentary evidence alone, but of the Church's faith." (Tradition and Traditions [San Diego, California: Basilica Press, 1966], pp. 398-399)

In Him,

dzheremi said:

We will share the orban/antidoron with you,

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Just for the benefit of members who may not know what my most pious friend @dzheremi is referring to, what he refers to is the blessed bread given to anyone who attends the Divine Liturgy, that is to say, the Holy Communion service held on Sunday mornings and on other occasions at both Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches.

It is from this blessed bread that the bread to be consecrated from the Eucharist is typically taken, selected during a preparatory service before the main liturgy itself begins (in Eastern Orthodoxy, this is called the Prothesis, Proskomide or Liturgy of Preparation), although in the case of the Coptic Orthodox church, their antidoron is so delicious and in such high demand that additional smaller rolls of antidoron are often baked in the oven while the divine liturgy is in progress, so there will be additional fresh bread available for distribution to the people after the liturgy has ended (the blessed bread from which the bread to be consecrated is taken is also fresh in Coptic Orthodox churches, because it is typically baked immediately before the Divine Liturgy begins, and the Divine Liturgy lasts at most about two and a half hours, and the blessed bread is kept warm once the bread to be consecrated is taken from it, which in Coptic Orthodox churches I believe is normally done at the conclusion of the Morning Raising of Incense*) just before or during the very start of the Divine Liturgy, while Kyrie Eleison is sung in Greek and the vernacular (Kyrie Eleison, Kyrie Eleison, Lord Have Mercy Upon Us), accompanied by percussion (except during Lent) .**

The point of the distribution of the blessed bread was originally to provide sustenance to everyone who attended church, as in times past this often involved a long walk, and the idea was that no one should go home hungry after church. This is in addition to meals that are routinely served after the liturgy in Orthodox churches (in the Syriac Orthodox Church, these are mainly done by the families of the departed at memorial liturgies, while many other Orthodox churches just serve them as a matter of hospitality every Sunday; I have also seen this at some Anglican and Episcopalian churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East also does it and I think it is a lovely tradition. Some churches accept donations for the meals and others charge a small fee for those who can afford it, which in my experience has never been more than $10, which is quite a good value considering how good the food usually is. Of course at a typical monastery everything will be free.

*The Morning Raising of Incense is analogous to Lauds or Morning Prayer in the Western church; it and the Evening Raising of Incense are descended from the old Cathedral liturgy of the Coptic Orthodox church, and are one of three parts of their services of daily prayer, the others being the Agpeya, or Hours, which consist of the reading of the Psalms and the Gospel and which are invariant except during Holy Week, and the Psalmody, which is highly variable and is analogous to Vespers, the Midnight Office and Matins, and which does vary depending on the time of year, the Psalmody during the month of Khiakh, which corresponds to Advent in the Coptic calendar, being particularly beloved. There are freely available PDFs that contain the Agpeya and much of the other services which I can assist users with, although for a definitive collection of Coptic liturgical material for each Sunday in the year I recommend obtaining the iPad app Coptic Reader with all the add-on content. There is also a very good description of the Coptic Divine Office, and the Divine Office of every other denomination, in the book The Liturgy of the Hours East and West by Fr. Robert Taft SJ, memory eternal (Fr. Taft has the distinction of being one of the few Jesuits whose scholarship I enjoy reading and who I generally agree with; usually I dislike everything about the Jesuits and tend to be drawn more to Catholic scholars from the Benedictines, the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and the Oratorians.

**I might be mistaken on the timing, and if I am, @dzheremi will correct me).

BBAS 64 said:

Good day,

Nope

Miracle: an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

Physical Contradictions—Conflict between Two Desired Values for One Parameter

Nonsense- something that makes no -sense, (syn)- foolishness

I hope that helps.

In HIm,

Bill

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Thank you for proving my point! I couldn't have hoped for a better response.

The Liturgist said:

With using what term?

Also how is it cannibalism when our Lord is both fully God and fully Human? We know that we partake of his divine nature because the Holy Apostle Peter literally says as much.

It would only be an act of cannibalism if we ate His unresurrected body and blood, which would be impossible for they were finite, although still unified to the divine essence. But in rising from the dead His human nature was glorified, and we attained access to that glory ourselves.

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The term I was referring to was transubstantiation.

Where we have common ground is the sacredness of celebrating communion. It is in fact part of our Sacerdotal duties and is a very visible reminder of what Jesus did for us.

Where we differ is in what is referred to as the mysticism.

This is the general theology forum. People from varying theological backgrounds are welcome in here. Perhaps this thread is just in the wrong forum?

We have differences of theology but the same Lord.

We have differences of traditions with the same Christ.

You are my brothers and sisters And it’s some point we will spend eternity together in glory because of Jesus Christ.

If the OP or anyone else does not want dissenting opinions or viewpoints, they should place their threads in the proper forum and there won’t be any discussion outside of a viewpoint.

Different theological positions are not Attacks.

hislegacy said:

The term I was referring to was transubstantiation.

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Ah, well in that case your point is, forgive me, irrelevant, because the belief that the Eucharist was the actual body and blood of our Lord predates the Scholastic concept of transubstantiation, which was provided as an explanation for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist in medieval Catholicism, but which was never accepted by Lutherans, who nonetheless clearly believe in the Real Presence as an absolute dogmatic reality, and which has seen only limited use by Orthodox, and its use by the Orthodox seems to be limited to using the word in order to express an unqualified belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, that it becomes His actual body and blood, as opposed to embracing the actual scholastic theological explanation for what happens as we find in, for example, the writings of Thomas Aquinas; the historic position of the Orthodox is simply that the Holy Spirit causes it to be the body and blood, and that it is a sacred mystery.

hislegacy said:

Where we have common ground is the sacredness of celebrating communion.

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That is greatly appreciated. If you have reverence for Holy Communion, that is an important point of common ground, even if you do not agree with us on what it is.

As far as the rest of your post is concerned, I’m not sure I understand what you are referring to, since I did not accuse you of attacking anyone, rather, I criticized your suggestion that if the idea that we actually partake of the body and blood of our Lord, that that is cannibalism, as being incorrect, because it fails to consider that our Lord is both fully human and fully divine, and that the Holy Apostle Peter refers to us as partakers of the divine nature, which clearly indicates that when we partake of the Eucharist, since the humanity and divinity of Christ are inseparable (except in the deeply flawed Christology of Nestorius), that we are partaking of both His divinity and His resurrected humanity, which has attributes not present in our fallen state (if he can appear and disappear at will as indicated by the Gospel according to St. Luke, He can feed us with His flesh and blood without causing harm to Himself aside from what He already experienced on the Cross), and that therefore there is nothing in common with cannibalism.

Edit: s/OP/post , thank you to @hislegacy for catching an embarrassing typo.

FireDragon76 said:

This seems to be the problem with Protestant fundamentalists in general. They think only their interpretation of the Bible just happens to be the correct one, and it's the Catholics or "liberals" that have got it wrong.

If Christianity is declining in the western world, it must partly be due to this kind of widespread lack of intellectual integrity.

Click to expand...

This is a good observation concerning Fundamentalism, which I do vehemently disagree with as an unpleasant subset of Reformed theology, which I believe should be distinguished from the old and valuable tradition of conservative Reformed theology that one associates with, for example, Dr. Albert Mohler, or Dr. James Kennedy.

However, I would argue that the worst offenders in terms of insisting their understanding of scripture is the only one clearly indicated by the text and the only correct one are not Fundamentalists, but rather members of certain Restorationist denominations.

The Liturgist said:

Ah, well in that case your point is, forgive me, irrelevant, because the belief that the Eucharist was the actual body and blood of our Lord predates the Scholastic concept of transubstantiation, which was provided as an explanation for the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist in medieval Catholicism, but which was never accepted by Lutherans, who nonetheless clearly believe in the Real Presence as an absolute dogmatic reality, and which has seen only limited use by Orthodox, and its use by the Orthodox seems to be limited to using the word in order to express an unqualified belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, that it becomes His actual body and blood, as opposed to embracing the actual scholastic theological explanation for what happens as we find in, for example, the writings of Thomas Aquinas; the historic position of the Orthodox is simply that the Holy Spirit causes it to be the body and blood, and that it is a sacred mystery.



That is greatly appreciated. If you have reverence for Holy Communion, that is an important point of common ground, even if you do not agree with us on what it is.

As far as the rest of your OP is concerned, I’m not sure I understand what you are referring to, since I did not accuse you of attacking anyone, rather, I criticized your suggestion that if the idea that we actually partake of the body and blood of our Lord, that that is cannibalism, as being incorrect, because it fails to consider that our Lord is both fully human and fully divine, and that the Holy Apostle Peter refers to us as partakers of the divine nature, which clearly indicates that when we partake of the Eucharist, since the humanity and divinity of Christ are inseparable (except in the deeply flawed Christology of Nestorius), that we are partaking of both His divinity and His resurrected humanity, which has attributes not present in our fallen state (if he can appear and disappear at will as indicated by the Gospel according to St. Luke, He can feed us with His flesh and blood without causing harm to Himself aside from what He already experienced on the Cross), and that therefore there is nothing in common with cannibalism.

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It is NOT my OP.

Personally it is not even part of my thought process. IMHO it is provocative and counter productive in a number of different ways.

The Liturgist said:

This is a good observation concerning Fundamentalism, which I do vehemently disagree with as an unpleasant subset of Reformed theology, which I believe should be distinguished from the old and valuable tradition of conservative Reformed theology that one associates with, for example, Dr. Albert Mohler, or Dr. James Kennedy.

However, I would argue that the worst offenders in terms of insisting their understanding of scripture is the only one clearly indicated by the text and the only correct one are not Fundamentalists, but rather members of certain Restorationist denominations.

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It seems to be a phenomenon that has alot of resonance with American values of individualism.

Even though I am a religious liberal, I don't find the decline of religion in the US to be unproblematic. I just don't see it as an opportunity to find scapegoats. I think our churches have done a poor job, not just of passing on the faith, but of lacking any justification for doing so in the first place. Combine this with the toxic weaponization of religion in politics, it's not hard to understand how most young Americans are estranged from religious institutions.

MarkRohfrietsch said:

So sad that people who call themselves Christian have an overwhelming need to destroy the faith of others; a faith that was taught to the Apostles, and maintained by the Apostolic Churches to this day. The faithful celebration of the Eucharist not only is a means of grace but a physical sign that our Lord remains with His Church forever. On the other hand, trying to destroy, demean and even shame those who hold this faith is not a show of faith, but a sign of the Antichrist. The eucharist Christ, it points to Christ. The idolatrous following of false prophets such as EGW and the attempts to destroy the faith of others is deplorable.

There, I said it. If the Eucharist is fair game for attack, then those who attack the Eucharist are also.

I will follow the Lord and the teaching of the apostles rather than apostates.

I'm done here.

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It is indeed sad that many Christians seem committed to "the Real Absence" as a cornerstone of their religion.

FireDragon76 said:

It is indeed sad that many Christians seem committed to "the Real Absence" as a cornerstone of their religion.

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That, and a militant embrace of Neo-Antidicomarianism to an extent that is crypto-Nestorian.