What Is The Doctrine Of Transubstantiation?
Contributing to the misunderstandings relative to the Lord’s Supper is the doctrine of transubstantiation. This doctrine holds that, when blessed by the priest, the bread becomes the physical body of Christ and the cup becomes the literal blood of our Savior—though the outward appearance of the bread and the fruit of the vine remain unchanged. This is an unobservable change in the substance of the communion elements according to Roman Catholic dogma. Their words “Eucharist” and “sacrament” are terms not found in the New Testament.
The Roman Catholic Church introduced this doctrine of transubstantiation about a thousand years after Christ established His church. In the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Sess. XIII, this doctrine is set forth:
In the Eucharist are contained truly, really, and substantially the body and blood, together with soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently the whole Christ (Canon 1).
The whole substance of the bread is converted into the body and the whole substance of the wine into the blood (Canon 2).
Their attempt to justify this position is to take Jesus’ statements “this is my body” and “this is my blood” as literal language (Matt. 26:26-28).
In reply to the Catholic position, we note that the Lord instituted a memorial in the Lord’s Supper. A memorial does not present the reality, in this case His literal flesh and blood, but something quite different, which serves as a reminder of the real thing. Jesus was speaking symbolically. We know this is so because when He made those statements He had not yet been crucified and He was at that very moment still in His physical body (flesh and blood). Therefore, the bread and cup could not have been His literal body and blood.
Furthermore, this is a figure of speech known as a metaphor, a comparison in which the likeness is implied rather than stated explicitly. Jesus used figurative language when He said, “I am the door” (John 10:7), of course He did not mean that He was a literal wooden door with hinges. He said, “I am the vine” (John 15:5)—but no one understood Him to mean that He was a grapevine.
If Christians actually ate the flesh and blood of Jesus then they would be cannibals. This would present a problem in regard to the prohibition against eating blood:
For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials: that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication; if you keep yourselves free from such things, you will do well. — Acts 15:28-29 NAS
The Roman Catholic Church acknowledges that in the mass there is no visible change in the bread and wine, that they continue to have the same properties: the same taste, color, smell, weight, and dimensions. It is sufficient to refute this doctrine to point out that their position involves impossibility. It is impossible that attributes of sensible properties of bread and wine should remain if the substance has been changed.
We will close our answer with the following excerpt from Greg Litmer’s Catholicism Examined:
Some Questions To Answer
“Since it is a principle of Roman Catholicism that ‘No proposition can be declared an article of faith unless perpetual belief in the church can be affirmed of it’ (The Roman Catholic Church, John L. McKenzie S.J., p. 212) and since the Baltimore Catechism states that the Lord instituted the Holy Eucharist (Transubstantiation) at the Last Supper, it stands to reason that the early church must have both believed and practiced it.
“However, with this being true, and it must be or Transubstantiation cannot be an article of faith, why is it that we do not find any inkling of this belief until the writings of Cyril of Jerusalem in the 4th century? Why is it that it was not until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 A.D. that Transubstantiation was declared as an article of faith? Why is it that the Council of Trent saw fit to restate it on Oct. 11, 1551? And why is it that in The Book of Catholic Quotations, bearing the Imprimatur of Francis Cardinal Spellman, we find under the heading of ‘the Eucharist: Sacrifice’, this quoted from Justin Martyr’s Dialogue With Trypho, written in the second century:
It is quite evident that this prophecy (Isaiah 33, 13-19) also alludes to the bread which our Christ gave us to offer in remembrance of the Body which He assumed for the sake of those who believe in Him, for whom He also suffered, and also to the cup which He taught us to offer in the Eucharist, in commemoration of His Blood.
“It is obvious that the New Testament church, under the direction of the apostles and those who lived very near the time of the apostles, did not believe in nor practice Transubstantiation. It is also clear from their own quotation that in the second century the bread was viewed as a remembrance of the body of Christ, and not the body itself. It is equally clear that the wine was viewed as commemorating the blood of Christ, and not as the blood itself. It was almost 1200 years after the establishment of the New Testament church before transubstantiation was definitively set forth. Doesn’t it seem unlikely that all of those infallible popes over that 1200 year period did not see fit to declare Transubstantiation as an article of faith if they themselves believed and practiced it?”
Your choice—the doctrine of men or the doctrine of God!
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