What is the difference between the real presence and transubstantiation

This is a serious problem and a serious denial of the true and absolute incarnation of the Word of God as a man. But, did not Jesus say in Matt. Is this not a declaration that Jesus will be physically present everywhere?

No, this is not what is stated. The answer is found in the teaching of the communicatio idiomatum. This is the teaching that the attributes of both the divine and human nature are ascribed to the single person of Christ.

It does not mean, however, that anything particular to the divine nature was communicated to the human nature. Likewise, it does not mean that anything particular to the human nature was communicated to the divine nature. It means that the attributes of the divine nature are claimed by the person of Christ.

Therefore, Jesus is omnipresent—not in His human nature but in His divine nature. Please notice that in these two verses, Jesus lays claim to the glory that He had with the Father before the foundation of the world. He also claims to have descended from heaven, but how could these be true since He is a man?

The answer is that the attributes of the divine nature are claimed by the person of Christ. Therefore, the person of Christ could claim to have glory with the Father and could claim to descend from heaven. But we know that the man Jesus, in the flesh, did not exist until His conception. Furthermore, this means that the two natures of Christ are distinct, yet they are in Union in the one person of Christ the hypostatic union.

It further means that the attributes of the divine and the attributes of the human are not transferred to one another—the divine does not become localized and the human does not become infinite.

If this were the case, then the nature of the divine and the nature of the human will be violated. Therefore, we can see that for Jesus to be a man, He must retain the attributes of humanity. This means that He must be localized, and it means He cannot be physically omnipresent. If He were, by definition He would not be a man. But the Roman Catholic position is that the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ, and this violates the doctrine of the incarnation.

Therefore, transubstantiation cannot be the correct teaching of Scripture. In the Roman Catholic Mass, there is a sacrifice of Christ.

In other words, in the ceremonies, is a reenactment and an actual sacrifice of Christ per the Mass. This is an obvious contradiction to the Scriptures which teach us that Christ died once for all, and that by the one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified. It does not state in the Word of God that the sacrifice of Christ must be repeated in order to forgive us of our sins or somehow help us to maintain our salvation by the infusion of grace.

I was thinking along the lines of the view, held by some of the Fathers, that the Church is constituted, albeit imperfectly, wherever two or three are gathered in the name of Christ, but the Church is only the Church in the fullest possible sense when it gathers under the authority of a bishop to celebrate the Eucharist.

Just some food for thought. On mystery - this is just what many of those who deny transubstantiation or at least are unwilling to fully assent to it are trying to preserve: they think that transubstantiation is far too detailed an account to try to give of something so mysterious.

On miracle - I'm not sure what you mean. I can tell you that I don't hold anything like a Thomistic account of the miraculous. You can read about the account I do hold here short, but somewhat technical, blog post and here very short blog post, linking to a long and rather technical philsophy paper.

On this theory of miracles, I think it is clear that the Eucharist will be miraculous on pretty much any theory of the Eucharist.

I think it might be helpful to distinguish between giving an analysis and explicating an idea. To participate means to be caused by some other power. Effects participate in their causes because they are the extension of the same causal power but to a diminished degree. Aristotle and Plato disagree on the priority of forms qua powers verses activities. Aristotle takes the later to be prior and Plato the former.

This is why secondary substances for Aristotle always depend on and never exist apart from primary substances. The problem with Idealism is essentially Nominalism, that only sensible particulars exist. That is a problem not just for the Eucharist, but for the consubstantiality of all humans with Adam and then with Christ as well as the Trinity. After all, what room is there for matter, let alone its redemption?

Given official statements by all of the Orthodox Patriarchates in the 19th century, and in other places, I do think they would say that Rome is definitely wrong on major points, including the Eucharist. A faulty methodology produced a faulty view.

That is the entire scholastic edifice of using dialectic which distinguishes objects through opposition or contradiction is simply inadequate for Christian theology as is made clear in the Christological controversies. The issue is fundamentally about the distinction and relation between nature and grace and how God is related to his creatures.

If God is all, do creatures have to be less or nothing? If God is active are creatures necessarily passive? As for 1 Cor 11, I think anemnesis or remembrance refers to whenever the eucharist is celebrated and not merely when they happen to eat. As for bread, the Orthodox have more than seven sacraments. Today we had the blessing of the Five loaves, which is also a sacrament. Everything in the Church is sacramental.

The bread received after the eucharist while blessed is not the same as the Eucharist. It is the left over bread andidoron after the center of the bread for the eucharist has been taken out.

This can be received by anyone, but the Eucharistic bread only by the faithful. As above, the issue is the nature of the relationship between deity and humanity.

If so, how? How can human nature simply appear and disappear as in the post-resurrection appearances? On what view of God is deification of human nature even possible since it is obvious that we do not become deified by participating in the divine essence itself. Is there something more to God than the essence? Unfortunately both Catholics and Protestants like to simply use Orthodoxy without any significant familiarity with it.

So, we do not share communion with the Catholics for the Catholics dogmatized heterodoxy-filioque, created grace, purgatory with its created fire, etc. While Rome permits under specific circumstances Orthodox to partake of Catholic Eucharist, the same is not true from the Orthodox point of view. The Orthodox Eucharist is life giving, which is why it has to be leavened bread, rather than an appeasement of wrath of a dying Christ. The Orthodox view of metamorphosis is not the same as Transubstantiation for the following reasons.

First, we do not think doctrine develops. We do not think Basil had a better understanding of the Trinity than Paul. And we do not think that doctrine develops because dialectic is not a suitable tool to explicate Christian doctrine.

It is not adequate for example to say that to be human is not to be divine and vice versa given the imago dei and the Incarnation. Christ wills two simultaneously different things in the Passion without one being good and the other sinful. This is why we do not have the same Eucharistic doctrine, let alone the same doctrine of veneration of the saints, for we do not have the same doctrine of deification and that because we do no thave the same doctrine of God, to bring it full circle.

This only makes a difference to those Protestants who affirm the former but not the later. It seems to me that you are barking up the wrong tree. Perry, thank you for your comments. I am not an expert on patristics, so there may be a lot of stuff that I've got wrong in that respect, and I would be happy to be corrected.

If you can give specific citations where Ignatius and Irenaeus discuss this issue, I would be most grateful. I wouldn't call myself an expert on Plato either, but I have studied him quite a bit. You say "To participate means to be caused by some other power," but this is certainly not an accurate interpretation of Plato.

The Greek word Plato uses for participation means, etymologically, "having a share in. This view appears to be refuted in the Parmenides , but Plato goes on to use it again in the Timaeus , which nearly all scholars agree is later than Parmenides Parmenides is a rather puzzling dialog.

I like your discussion of a Pauline sense of "patterned after' essentially, the concept of typology , but I'm not sure it's really that much different from Plato though it's clearly not identical.

Idealism doesn't deny the existence of immaterial substances, and I'm not at all convinced that "the consubstantiality of all humans with Adam" is a point of orthodoxy at all. This comes form the Cappadocians, doesn't it? I don't have anything against the Cappadocians quite the contrary , but this is a doctrine I don't find it in Scripture or in the creeds, and I don't mind disagreeing with saints, no matter how well-respected, when they go beyond what I find in the creeds and, especially, in Scripture.

I don't see any reason why I need matter to be ontologically fundamental remember, idealists don't deny that matter exists, but only that it is ontologically fundamental in order to line up with Christian orthodoxy. I found your discussion of the Orthodox view quite interesting and informative. Thanks again for contributing to the discussion! For me, this is mostly an academic matter trying to correct the clearly false claim that the early Fathers believed in transubstantiation , though I certainly find the discussion interesting!

I was once fairly confident in my Zwinglian view of the sacraments, but have recently been moving in the direction of the Calvinist "spiritual presence" view, and have even started to take the idea of the Real Presence seriously.

You are, of course, correct that Calvary Chapel teaches a completely Zwinglian symbolic interpretation of the sacraments. As for Plato, I still find that I must disagree with your assessment. I agree that effects have a share in their cause for the simple reason that they are fundamentally the same power, albeit to a diminished degree. Forms for Plato are not abstract since they are the causes of things and abstract entities cause nothing.

Forms are the models for instances since their causal activity is continuous whereas their signs or energies are temporary. Consequently effects participate in their cause imperfectly and the relation is asymmetrical.

It fully is both the death of Christ and our death with Christ, consequently there is no opposition between Christ and the creature. Christ is active and I am fully active for his life is mine. Consequently Pauline theology is non-dialectical in that sense and so anti-Platonic. Idealism may not deny the existence of immaterial substances, though that is a different question as to whether it is consistent with such a thesis. More troubling though is its apparent inconsistency with the kind of consubstantiality all of humanity shares with Adam and with Christ.

You may not think that such a doctrine is not in Scripture. I of course disagree. I think it is and it is easily demonstratable that it was in the mind of those who formulated the Creeds.

It is arguably implicit in the doctrine of the general resurrection. Moreover such a denial of consubstantiality reveals deeper problems of making sense of the consubstantiality of the members of the Trinity.

It is no accident that the dominance of extrinsic relations during the 17th century in idealism also witnessed the reviving of Arianism. I understand your position on authority, but for me it sounds funny, as in odd. I am not sure why if the judgment of those who knew God in a kind of direct experiential way is not normative why you would take your own to be so.

If they can error, so much the more reason to refuse to take your own judgment as having adequate normative force to bind the conscience. I would have been a fool to reject some belief in a Cliffordian manner. So I find problematic the assumption that a belief is to be rejected or left idle until such time as a demonstration is brought forward. Sometimes beliefs are not guilty until proven innocent.

As for matter, well Berkeley obviously had a hard time with it and Plato certainly did, not to mention the whole era of middle and late Platonism. Of course, I think the same thing is true for the Zwinglian and Calvinist takes as well. As for CC, I must say I am at a loss as to why someone with your abilities goes there but perhaps you could take some time to explain.

How many other people in CC read Dionysius, let alone translate him?! Are you using the terms "dialectic" and "idealism" in their Hegelian senses? Lowly Layman likes this. And because that Christ, our Redeemer, declared that which He offered under the species of bread to be truly His own body, therefore has it ever been a firm belief in the Church of God, and this holy Synod doth now declare it anew, that, by the consecration of the bread and of the wine, a conversion is made of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood; which conversion is, by the holy Catholic Church, suitably and properly called Transubstantiation.

Botolph , Nov 23, Christina and Madeline like this. I have great difficulty with anything that attempts to abrogate Trent. For why should the Lord put in your hand the symbol of his body, unless it was to assure you that you really participate in it? And if it is true that a visible sign is given to us to seal the gift of an invisible thing, when we have received the symbol of the body, let us rest assured that the body itself is also given to us.

Methodism: Methodists believe in the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine or grape juice while, like Anglicans, Presbyterians and Lutherans, rejecting transubstantiation. According to the United Methodist Church, "Jesus Christ, who 'is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being' Hebrews , is truly present in Holy Communion. The Catechism for the use of the people called Methodists thus states that, "[in Holy Communion] Jesus Christ is present with his worshipping people and gives himself to them as their Lord and Saviour".

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