Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:Doc Holliday said:BusyTarpDuster2017 said:
Here we go again, folks. They can't answer my question or argue with substance, so they try to redirect the conversation with a preachy attitude about my conversation method or other "character faults" they perceive. It never fails.
If Doc won't answer me, then can any other Orthodox/Roman Catholic actually address what I'm asking? What exactly does a believer miss out on if they don't take communion with the "Real Presence" but rather with a symbolic/memorialist view? Be clear.
Hey I'm not on here all the time, you need to stop making demands like you have some kind of authority around here.
I gave you 6 paragraphs of reasoning that you ignored, but we can go straight to Paul:
Hebrews 13:9-15. Paul contrasts the animals sacrificed by Israel at the tabernacle with what we have, which is an altar that those who serve the tent have no right to eat from. He calls it an altar, with a sacrifice, contrasted to the symbolic sacrifices of the animals.
Then he says "let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God." Do you know what that word is there, sacrifice of praise? Eucharistia. The whole passage is about the superiority of our Eucharistic offering and meal that we eat versus what the Jews eat at the tabernacle, the animals.
Your reformed position forces you to take the equivalent to Old Testament symbolism, but that's exactly what Paul is contrasting it against. He's not saying the way to eat non carnally is without your mouth, because he says we eat at an altar. You don't have an altar in your theology. So what are you actually eating or even doing?
If it were symbolic, Hebrews wouldn't need to build the whole case on continuity with tabernacle categories. It would just tell you to stop sacrificing and start believing. Instead it tells you the sacrifice continues, just transformed.
Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians 10, "the bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?" Participation (koinonia) is stronger than remembrance. You don't participate in a symbol. So concretely, what's missed is this: real, ongoing union with Christ's actual life through the physical means he appointed, not a mental exercise about a past event. The whole logic of the Incarnation is that God saves us through matter, not around it. Water really regenerates in baptism, oil really heals in anointing, and bread and wine really become his body and blood, because God doesn't leave matter behind when he saves us, he sanctifies it and works through it
You're STILL not answering the question. You've gotten lost and are now arguing something different.
I'll try again: what exactly does a believer miss out on if they don't take communion with the "Real Presence" but rather with a symbolic/memorialist view? You quoted Jesus in John 6:53 as your "answer" - so then explain: what is this verse saying about what that believer misses out on? Tell us exactly. Be clear.
What's missed is real, ongoing union with Christ's actual life through the physical means he appointed. You don't have that because you deny its physical.
But... what does that mean? What does it entail, in REAL terms? What is a believer who is not in an "ongoing union with Christ's actual life through physical means" actually missing or in danger of?
You're only replacing unclear language with more unclear language.
Its very clear and you're the one refusing to answer my questions. You demand answers from me and refuse to answer questions just asked to you.
It entails multiple things: bodily resurrection, healing, and abiding.
I'm not refusing to answer your questions, I'm trying to keep you focused on the issue I raised at the beginning, so I'm narrowing the attention to that specific point, because you keep running away from it and hiding that fact by writing long posts and asking your own set of questions. I have to keep the focus on the relevant point for the sake of clarity.
So, regarding your answers here (which you could have just clearly given from the beginning, but instead you made me go through the whole rigamarole of getting you to focus and honestly answer the question): bodily resurrection, healing, and abiding. Obviously, healing and abiding are not isolated to only those who take the "Real Presence" in communion. So I'm not sure how you can even argue that these are what a believer would miss out on simply by taking the symbolic/memorialist view of communion, or by not taking communion at all. That leaves "bodily resurrection", which ultimately means salvation to eternal life. Meaning specifically, that a person who believes in the Gospel and places their full trust in Jesus for their salvation, but who does NOT take the "Real Presence" in communion, is still NOT SAVED. This clearly is false. It falsifies everything we know from Scripture about salvation. The people in Scripture who we know got saved, like the thief on the cross, the sinful woman of Luke 7, and the house of Cornelius, ATE NOTHING. You'd even have to say that the house of Cornelius, even after believing the gospel, receiving the Holy Spirit, and getting water baptized, if they were to die right afterwards, they would NOT be saved because they didn't physically consume communion bread and wine. Any rational believer can easily see that this is totally absurd and just isn't supported in Scripture.
A believer who does not ever take communion or who does not take the "Real Presence" view, has absolutely nothing to worry about missing resurrection or salvation. In the very same chapter where Jesus says "whoever eats my flesh, I will raise him up on the last day" Jesus also says:
"For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day."
So if your view has it where someone can be a believer, but NOT have eternal life and NOT be raised (as yours does), then your view directly contradicts the words of Jesus, directly contradicts Scripture, and thus, simply isn't tenable.
I am amazed that there are those who call themselves "Christian" who actually believe that God is going to make a person's eternal fate not based on what's truly in their hearts, but rather completely contingent upon what they're able to physically put in their stomachs. If you truly believe this, then you don't know the character of God, and you just don't understand the Gospel.
I go into detail because this is more complex than you realize, and you've never really dealt with Eastern Christianity, it's a radically different framework than the West. Christianity developed primarily in the eastern world, not the Latin world.
I can tell you don't have a clue what argument or what my position actually is, because you think I'm making a claim that those who don't partake in the Eucharist are automatically damned. Orthodoxy doesn't claim people outside the Church or without access to the Eucharist are automatically damned. We don't claim to know the boundaries of God's mercy that precisely, only that the Church has been given the fullness of the means of grace. That's a Roman Catholic caricature you're arguing against, not the Orthodox position.
Eastern Christianity is relational. Latin/Western Christianity (you) is transactional, built on legal categories: guilt, merit, satisfaction, a ledger that gets balanced. That's why the reformation happened, Rome got hyper transactional, and guess what…you're hyper transactional too! Just look at your response to me.
This confuses you because you're looking for a marker, a specific criteria or event that flips your status. That reasoning doesn't show up until after the medieval West. It's nominalist: salvation as a legal declaration applied at a single point, based on one transaction, belief as a mental act.
I don't think in single markers, and neither did anyone in the time of Christ and the apostles. Salvation is union with Christ that begins, grows, and is sustained, not a status acquired once and carried around regardless of what follows. Baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, ongoing repentance, these aren't hoops bolted onto "real" salvation. They're the actual life of being joined to Christ, the way a marriage isn't just the vow, it's the whole ongoing union the vow inaugurates.
But you JUST said that what the believer will miss if they don't take the "Real Presence" communion meal is resurrection, i.e. salvation. And now you're hedging on it, and thus retreating away from clarity and back into obfuscation. And now we're back to where we started - we still don't know what it is, exactly, that a believer misses out on if they don't take the "Real Presence" in communion, and hence WHY the Eucharist bread and wine HAVE TO be the real body and blood of Jesus in the first place, instead of being a symbol or memorial. Therefore, your church (as well as Roman Catholicism) isn't making a very good case at all why the "Real Presence" view is a salvivic one, and therefore mandatory in your church. That's my whole point here.
You almost certainly believe faith normally comes through hearing the preached word, Romans 10:17, "faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ." That's the ordinary means God appointed. But you wouldn't say someone who never heard a sermon or read Scripture, an infant, someone in a coma, someone in a remote place who dies before ever hearing the gospel, is automatically and definitely damned with zero exception, as though God's hands are tied by his own ordinary pattern. You'd probably say something like "God normally works through preaching, and in extraordinary cases he's not limited to it." That's exactly the structure I'm using for the Eucharist.
So it's not that I'm inventing a special escape hatch for my view. I'm using the same category you already use for how faith itself comes about: this is the real, appointed, ordinary means, without claiming to know God's exact judgment on every person who lacked access to it through no fault of their own. Those are two separate questions, and collapsing them into "well then nothing really matters" or "well then it's all just mandatory with no exceptions" isn't how you reason about your own doctrine of faith and preaching. Why would it suddenly become obfuscation only when the topic is communion?
You gotta understand normative means. Until you actually understand normative means as a category, you're going to keep hearing "this is really necessary in the ordinary case" and "God isn't limited to the ordinary case" as a contradiction, when they're not. This is also exactly why the thief on the cross can't be the model you build a normal doctrine of salvation on. He's the extraordinary exception, dying next to Christ himself, with no opportunity for baptism, preaching, or a church, not the pattern. Nobody sane builds their theology by saying "well the thief didn't need X, so X must not really matter." You'd never tell a congregation "don't worry about baptism, hearing the gospel, or the church, just look at the thief." He's proof God can save outside the ordinary means when circumstances make the ordinary means impossible, not proof the ordinary means are optional for everyone else.
If your answer is that normatively salvation is what's at stake so that you can account for that caveat, then that's fine. But the problem with this view is that Scripture clearly indicates it isn't "normatively" the case at all.
That's an assertion you haven't backed up. You keep making claims without explaining why.
John 6 repeats the literal eating language five separate times, and the crowd's reaction (offense, walking away) is described as the reasonable response to a genuinely hard, literal teaching. You have to explain why the text repeats itself that insistently if it means something softer than what it says, and why Jesus doesn't correct or soften it when people leave.
Hebrews 13:9-15: Paul builds a direct comparison, altar to altar, sacrifice to sacrifice, eating to eating, between the Old Covenant priests and Christians. He says we "have an altar" the tabernacle priests "have no right to eat from." Prove that's symbolic. Explain why exclusion language ("no right to eat") applies to something merely figurative, when you can't be excluded from a metaphor. And explain why eucharistia, ritual offering language, shows up in the middle of a passage saturated with cultic vocabulary (priest, altar, sacrifice, blood, sanctify) if the whole point was just verbal thanksgiving.
Don't just assert Scripture is clear here. Show me, from the actual wording of these two passages, where the literal reading breaks down and the symbolic reading is required.
MY GOD... you literally are a brick wall. I've explained from Scripture and pure logic REPEATEDLY in this forum why salvation is NOT contingent on the literal eating and drinking of Jesus' flesh and blood. And none of you have any answer to them. You're just on repeat like a broken record, refusing to grasp a single thing that's been explained. Do I really need to repeat them for the umpteenth time?
Your position isn't making any sense. Explain exactly why the people left Jesus after he spoke those words in John 6. Why, precisely, were his words so offensive to them? If the repeating of these words indicates they didn't mean something "softer than what it says", then why not take the literal interpretation that the Roman Cathoilcs do, that it means we are to literally eat his literal flesh?? After all, those are the direct words in that verse, and you don't want to take them as meaning something softer, right?
Similarly, with your reference to Hebrews, if the author is making a point to point comparison between the old Temple sacrifices and Jesus' sacrifice, then why doesn't that mean that we are to physically eat Jesus' literal flesh as the Roman Catholics believe? You're making the argument for the Roman Catholic "Real Presence" view, rather than the Orthodox's, which is weird.
Explain this (because you seem to be destroying your own view) and I will go through the whole rigamarole of explaining why both your view and the Roman Catholic view is false... yet again.
