We Are a People of the Eucharist

[SolomonVII]

The typical argument is to whether or not this should be taken literally, as actual offering of life and sustenance, rather than a metaphor.

It is not a Catholic argument, of course. However else we may understand the Eucharist, as allegory, or as myth, or as euphemism, the underlying truth is that this is literal. We are being fed on Christ.

Protestants have often forgotten that now. I would argue that the difference of understanding here does not extend merely to Constantine, or even Jesus, but stem back to basic different Jewish expressions that have been captured in the Catholic literature of Dueterocanicals.

We as Christians are of the Jews that developed in the disaspora, away from the Law, away from the Temple, Jews surrounded in Greek Culture, and reading their Scripture from the Greek Septuagint.
The language was not the Temple Hebrew, but the language of the street, Greek, Roman, or in the case of Jesus, Aramaic.

This in short was the Judaism of pluralism, a Judaism that could speak scathingly against the Temple Jews of the Sadducees, or the officiousness of the Pharisee, just like Jesus did.

It is a very different kind of Jewish expression that is captured in the Diaspora of an integrated Jewish community, citizenship Jew, even, like Paul. It is captured in the bloody scenes of Maccabeees, with seven brothers tortured to death courageous to the point of foolhardiness with the promise of Resurrection at the core of their faith.

This is not the Judaism of the Temple, whose writings Protestants accepted and fully endorsed with the amputation of Deuterocanon from Scripture. The writings of Jews without the Deuterocanon are one where the blood and the passion of the Resurrection is superceded by desire for the land of Israel. It is a Judaism where Satan is a cynical angel, and not the Satan that Jesus scathingly calls out as an enemy of mankind in his own lifetime.
Without the context of the Deuterocanons, it is pretty easy to see that this is based in metaphor. Temple Jews had had a very different outlook on meaning of Scripture than the Jews of the Diaspora, Jews that could understand themselves as playing a part in Gentile society, because that is what their lives had already become.

To understand the Eucharist literally is to understand that we as a eucharist people have been part of the feeding process though the ages.

In many ways, the ancient Rome church could be likened to the ugly old stepsister in comparison to her more beautiful siblings in Alexandria and Jerusalem and the Byzantine.

Rome was distant from the centre of power, decaying, swamp infested and evangelizing to the mud creatures and undesirables that defined Western Europe after the devastations of history. To understand that is to understand that God literally fed the best part of Christianity to the Muslims. Not just through conquest, but through the slow burn differential taxation and differential levels of respect in Islamic society, as servants, and as slaves, and even as partners, Islam slowly consumed Christians until the Christians have become them.

The fact is that we are a Eucharist people. We do offer ourselves as food to those that hunger. The Eucharist principle is that we become what we eat. Muslims of the Middle East and North Africa have been fed a steady diet of Christians for centuries now.

There is a connection in that.

 

[Barney2.0]

God never fed the best part of Christianity to anyone, although Satan through all he could at us, the Goths, Huns, Persians, Arab Muslims, Bulgars, Rus, Latin Crusaders, Turks, 2000 years later and we're still standing with the grace of God.

 

[SolomonVII]

The question that would spring to my mind would be more to how much of Christianity might be preserved in Moslems, and what kind of benefit that might be for us, if we were able to ensure Muslims complete freedom, including freedom from other Muslims making the choice for them.

 

[Barney2.0]

The question that would spring to my mind would be more to how much of Christianity might be preserved in Moslems, and what kind of benefit that might be for us, if we were able to ensure Muslims complete freedom, including freedom from other Muslims making the choice for them.

We can’t ensure Muslims complete freedom only they can do so and that can only happen by discarding Islam away along with its Sharia.

 

[SolomonVII]

Political Islam will never be free. Muslims under sharia law will find it advantageous to be outward Muslims, no matter what there personal beliefs may resemble.

As for myself I am all Red White and Blue, mother's and apple pie don't tread on me advocate of American freedom.
The freedom to say what you want includes the freedom to think what you want.

My discussion then is with what would our best gift to the diaspora Muslim population, which will only grow larger as political Islam and its reach toward totalitarian examples drives more and more outside of the house of Islam.

Liberals control immigration policy in the West. Chances are, the Islamic diaspora from the House of Islam will be great.

I fiercely guard the freedom to think agenda of America, and so do the vast majority of Americans of whatever political persuasion. Americans are all fiercely against political correctness and the group-think that it engenders among its partisans.


My conversation then was more to the Islamic diaspora, and whether the reach of Political Islam can be kept at bay so that the diaspora Muslims can think whatever they want to think without fear of retribution.
What will such a people, free from the yoke of oppressive theocratic government, actually think, if there is no compulsion to think anything?

What I am really taking not of then is how the literal flesh of Muslims in the Middle East originated in a Christian population, literally fed from the most spiritual and most cultural and most theologically urbane of Christians at the time that God began feeding them to Islamic culture. The Orthodox Christian forms of the Christian East were literally fed to the Islamic Empire, until the Empire consisted mainly of former Christians.
What will these people be like, if they believe that they can safely think what they want to think, and not compulsed to take the official line of political Islamic government?

I trust God's wisdom on this actually.

Freedom is what we are called to give the Islamic Diaspora, and first and foremost that freedom is against Political Islam.

 

[SolomonVII]

• Christianity grew from the Jewish diaspora. The culture was not strictly tied to the Temple, and Temple orthodoxy, but it was the culture of a pluralistic people living in the Hellenistic Empire. The culture of this Judaism was heterodox, in that outside, of the Temple, Jews were influenced by the non-Jewish people that one meets in any diaspora. This it the Judaism of the Maccabees, or zealous belief in physical bodily resurrection, and the defining of good and evil with much Zoroastrian influence, as that Satan that Jesus deals with is defined by his malevolence to an extent that Torah made no mention of. This was the people of the Septuagint Bible.

In official orthodoxies of any kind, orthodoxy is the safe choice for people. For diaspora Jews, for whom allegiance to the official orthodoxies of any authority was not an option, the pluralism of a tolerance of heterodoxy was the best that could be hoped for.

Early Apostolic Christianity inherited that reality where official tolerance of heterodox forms was the norm until Christianity became the official orthodoxy.

Christians were not of the official Judaism of the Temple and the Sadducees and the Pharisees. It was from the Christianity of the Septuagint, a people adapted to private religious experience.
We are a Eucharist people. Our Temple is the table of the world.
And we are food for the world that opens its table to us.