You seem to be clutching at straws. The whole point is that this belief in real presence is worth consideration and should not be dismissed as a novel, minority opinion or one that is non-essential or one that is new and not supported by history. It is the majority opinion in Christianity and has always been so. Instead of addressing the true points, you have been trying to split hairs.
No sir I am not.
You just made a statement that the RCC and a couple of other denominations make up 80% of the Christian faith. I do not know of anyone who can confirm such a statement and I kind of think that you just pulled it out of thin air. But that is just me.
That is an impossible figure. You seem to be telling me that because 8 out of 10 Christians believe what you believe that I should reject the Scriptures and come around to your understanding.
I looked up on a CATHOLIC web site
Knowing is believing--and sometimes not knowing is believing, too
and found that 50% of CATHOLICS do not even know what Real Presence is.
So allow me to ask you WHO is the one splitting hairs and WHO is in the minority position????
Just so that we are clear, I do not accept the Real Presence of Christ in the communion wafers or the juice of the cup neither do I accept the process of Transubstaciation.
The “real presence” of the Lord Jesus Christ in the Lord’s Supper is a doctrine of Roman Catholicism that teaches that, instead of being symbolic rites,
communion and
baptism are opportunities for the real presence of God to appear.
In the case of communion, they believe once the priest has blessed the wine and the bread, the wine becomes Jesus’ blood and the bread becomes His flesh. They cannot explain how, but they believe this transformation (called
transubstantiation) allows God to spiritually nourish the partaker to better serve Him and to be Christ to the lost world.
This concept is hard even for Roman Catholics to fully explain as the 50% figure confirms. They believe that Jesus instituted communion as a way of allowing believers to participate in the ongoing sacrifice of the cross. Of course NO ONE can explain HOW that works.
There are two major problems with this line of thought.
First, there is no way that a ceremony can recreate Jesus’ crucifixion. There is no mention that the act of the crucifixion, which occurred within the confines of a linear timeline, is somehow free of that timeline to be as eternal as God Himself. But we have no way of participating in an act that occurred nearly two thousand years ago, except in the symbolic sense.
But on a practical level, the bread does not become flesh. The wine does not become blood. And no amount of belief is going to make it so. The more urgent issue is the false belief that God’s blessing and nourishment come through that bread and wine. Roman Catholicism teaches that liturgy (taken from the Greek for “work”) is the conduit through which God provides blessing and salvation. Essentially, in addition to placing the priest between the congregants and God, they also place the bread and wine between themselves and God. They believe they are blessed because of their obedience in taking communion, and that blessing literally streams from God through the bread and wine and into their souls.
This is not what Jesus taught. He said, “I am the bread of life” and “It is the Spirit who gives life, the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (
John 6:48,
63). Jesus is the bread of life, but He is also the Word (
John 1:1). The bread that nourishes is the Word of God (
Matthew 4:4), not a wafer somehow transformed into the flesh of Jesus. The idea that we have to go through a human ceremony to receive that spiritual nourishment is the type of belief Jesus came to abolish. His death tore the veil in the temple, giving us the ability to have a direct relationship with God (
Hebrews 4:16). That veil was not replaced by the act of blessing and eating bread and wine.
Why is the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper such a controversial issue?
