“the bedrock doctrine of Transubstantiation”.
Okay. Except, of course, that transubstantiation is not bedrock doctrine. The Catholic Church never heard of it for the first millennium of its existence and whole apostolic communions with valid orders still don’t have it as part of their tradition.
The Real Presence is the bedrock doctrine. “Take this, all of you and eat it, for this is my body, which shall be given up for you” is what Christ asks us to believe, not some particular theory or explanation of how that might be so. The apostles, so far as we can tell, never had the slightest clue how that could be true, never attempted to explain how it could be true, and never demanded any Christian accept or create an explanation of it. They simply accepted it. Given that when Jesus told them “in three days the Son of Man will be raised from the dead” and found that this turned out to be literally true, they decided not to overcomplicate matters when it came to the Eucharist as well. Bodily resurrections have that effect on people.
Transubstantiation is just an attempt to articulate what goes on in the Eucharist in language acceptable to medievals excited about Aristotle. You can accept it if it helps you or leave it alone. It’s not important. All Christ asks we accept is “This is my body and blood. Do this in memory of me.”
C.S. Lewis once remarked that for thousands of years people have eaten their dinners and felt better. Then some technicians came up with language to try to explain why (vitamins and carbs and proteins and such). And people have gone on eating their dinners and some have paid attention to the technicians and some have not. And, if tomorrow it turns out that vitamins don’t exist, they will go on eating their dinners and feeling better.
“The command, after all, was ‘Take, eat’, not ‘Take, understand’.- C.S. Lewis
“This is my body”, not transubstantiation, is the bedrock doctrine. It’s perfectly acceptable to have no clue how that revelation could be so.
So don’t let that stop you from being Catholic.
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4 Responses
Perfect. It took me a long time to overcome my early education and realize this. We mustn’t claim more for theological or philosophical “ways to think through” than they can support and we mustn’t expect people to adopt a particular grammar of metaphysics as if it’s an article of the faith. Some of our separated brethren are more sensible about this than we are, at least in theory: “Jesus said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Would that it were actually true in practice; bring up the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and see who it is that quarrels.
God can do anything – you know, create everything, become a human being and rescue the world, etc. – but for some strange reason he can’t mysteriously turn bread and wine into his body and blood…go figure…but it my formerly Methodist father a very happy person when he received his First Communion at the same time as one of my older sisters when he decided “whatever God says is, is,” which was the basis of his Methodist faith and the foundation of his Catholic faith as well.
Very Lutheran 😉 But I agree completely.
It’s not quite that simple:
Canon 2.If anyone says that in the sacred and, holy sacrament of the Eucharist the substance of the bread and wine remains conjointly with the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and denies that wonderful and singular change of the whole substance of the bread into the body and the whole substance of the wine into the blood, the appearances only of bread and wine remaining, which change the Catholic Church most aptly calls transubstantiation,[43] let him be anathema.”