Partaking of Christ's flesh and blood; Augustine instructs - how to understand - Part 3

Lying at the heart of the differences of interpretation (addressed here, here, and here) regarding the doctrine of the Lord's Supper, is the question of how one is to understand what the Scripture speaks concerning it.  How is the Church to read and understand difficult passages of the Bible in order to come to godly teaching?  The church fathers made their appeal to right doctrine from the teaching of Scripture.  This question must be answered, not only for Protestants, but Rome as well, since the "infallible" teaching of the Roman Church claims to true doctrine consistent with Scripture.

To help answer that question I thought I'd not call on any Reformed voices, of which there are many able and reliable.  Rather let me quote the eminent theologian Augustine, from Thomas Cranmer's Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550).  Cranmer writes:

And yet most plainly of all other, St. Augustine doth declare this matter in his book De Doctrina Christiana in which book he instructeth Christian people how they should understand those places of Scripture, which seem hard and obscure.

"Seldom," saith he, "is any difficulty in proper words, but either the circumstances of the place, or the conferring of divers translations, or else the original tongue wherein it was written, will make the sense plain.  But in words that be altered from their proper signification, there is great diligence and heed to be taken  And specially we must beware, that we take not literally any thing that is spoken figuratively.  For contrariwise, we must not take for a figure, any thing that is spoken properly.  Therefore must be declared," saith Augustine, "the manner how to discern a proper speech from a figurative; wherein, " saith he, "must be observed this rule, that if the thing which is spoken be to the furtherance of charity, then it is a proper speech, and no figure.  So that if it be a commandment that forbiddeth any evil or wicked act, or commandeth any good or beneficial thing, then it is no figure.  But if it command any ill or wicked thing, or forbid anything that is good and beneficial, then it is a figurative speech.

So how does Augustine unpack what he is instructing?  He happens to focus on one of the most difficult passages for men to hear, that of Christ's words regarding the eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood as found in John chapter 6.  It was because of these words spoken by Jesus that many stopped following him.  And even His chosen disciples were troubled.  Continuing with Augustine in the passage from Cranmer:

"Now the saying of Christ, 'Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall have no life in you', seemeth to command an heinous and a wicked thing; therefore it is a figure, commanding us to be partakers of Christ's passion, keeping in our minds to our great comfort and profit, that his flesh was wounded for us."

 Thus in another part of his book Cranmer sums up St. Augustine's teaching on the sacraments:

And therefore St. Ausgustine saith, Contra Maximinum, that "in the sacraments we must not consider what they be, but what they signify.  For they be signs of things, being one thing, and signifying another."

By this neither Augustine nor Cranmer were denying that Christians do partake of Christ's body and blood.  The confession of the Church of England's, The Thirty-Nine Articles, summarizes the Reformed understanding.  The relevant sections are shown below:

XXV. Of the Sacraments.
Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men's profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God's good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him.

XXVIII. Of the Lord's Supper.
The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another, but rather it is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ's death: insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same, the Bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ; and likewise the Cup of Blessing is a partaking of the Blood of Christ. 

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. 

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper, is Faith.

Again, the purpose of these last several posts is not to offer some definitive case against Rome's teaching of transubstantiation.  Rather, it is to provide evidence that the early church writers, in conjunction with Scripture, taught not the Roman doctrine.  And a case, therefore, can be made that the Reformers' teachings on this doctrine were consistent with those church patriarchs as well as Scripture.

Update 10-16-2013:
A question has been raised as to the authenticity of the early church fathers' quotes in this and the previous two posts.  So, I am adding this Link to Authorities in Appendix which is A Collection of Authorities cited by Cranmer and others in the Controversy on the Lord's Supper '.  In addition here is a footnote from the first page of that Appendix:

1 [Cranmer and his adversaries in the Eucharistic controversy seldom printed more than a version of the authorities which they cited : and mutual charges of mistranslation were the result. To enable the reader to form his own judgment on these charges, without referring to the voluminous works of the Fathers, a large number of the original passages have here been extracted. They have been arranged in chronological order, partly for convenience of reference, and partly for the purpose of presenting a series of citations on the Lord's Supper, from the time of Ignatius, A. I). 101, to that of the Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, when the doctrine of transubstantiation was finally established. The inquiry, it will be remembered, may be pursued further, by referring also to those authorities, which, being quoted by the contending parties in the original language, it has been thought unnecessary to repeat here.]

Cranmer's and his Roman Catholic adversary in this dispute wrote their works in Latin.  Thus the citations are in Latin.  I take the editors meaning to be that any disagreement over translation had to do with the citations of those who wrote in Greek or, in addition, subsequent English translations.

Rome's transubstantiation: There's a disturbance in the force (tradition) Part 2

In the last post I laid out some historical evidence which sounds a dissonant note in the so-called unified voice of tradition supporting Rome's teaching of transubstantiation. The purpose of these two posts is to show the inconsistency between Rome claiming the church fathers as supporting witnesses and the actual writings of those witnesses.  Those first examples were by no means isolated.  Rather, there were numerous early and later theologians and scholars that wrote of quite the opposite of Rome's doctrine.

Picking up where I left off, Thomas Cranmer, in his Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550), wrote of the Bishop of Rome, Gelasius (late 4th century), who by the way advocated for the supremacy of the Roman bishopric.  Cranmer comments regarding Gelasius' argument that refuted the heresies of Eutyches and Nestorius:

The other example is of the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ; which, saith he, "is a godly thing, and yet the substance or nature of bread and wine do not cease to be there still."

Cranmer continues with an example from Origen:

And Origen, declaring the said eating of Christ's flesh and drinking of his blood, not be undertood as the words do sound, but figuratively, writeth thus upon these words of Christ, Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you shall not have life in you:  "Consider," saith Origen, "that these things, written in God's books, are figures; and therefore examine and understand them, as spiritual and not as carnal men..."

In another place the Arch-bishop writes of Ambrose:

And in the same book he saith, "As thou hast in baptism received the similtude of death, so likewise dost thou in this sacrament drink the similtude of Christ's precious blood."  And again he saith in the said book, "The priest saith, Make unto us this oblation to be acceptable, which is the figure of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ."

And concurring with Ambrose:

And therefore St. Augustine saith, Contra Maximinum, that "in the sacraments we must not consider what they be, but what they signify.  For they be signs of things, being one thing, and signifying another..."

 And in his book De Doctrina Christiana, St. Augustine saith, (as before at length declared)' that "to eat Christ's flesh and drink his blood, is a figuative speech, signifying the participation of his passion, and delectable remembrance to our benefit and profit, that his flesh was crucified and wounded for us."

I'll finish with two examples that Cranmer supplies from the late medieval church period, not too many years before the Reformation and Rome's Council of Trent:

And Gabriel [priest and scholar - 15th century] also, who of all other wrote most largely upon the canon of the Mass, saith thus:  "It is to be noted, that although it be taught in the Scripture, that the body of Christ is truly contained and received of Christian people under the kinds of bread and wine; yet how the body of Christ is there, whether by conversion of anything into it, or without conversion the body is there with the bread remaining still there, it is not found expressed in the Bible..."

and:

For Johannes Scotus, otherwise called Duns, the subtlest of all the school authors, in treating of this matter of transubstantiation, showeth plainly the cause thereof:  "For," saith he, "the words of the Scripture might be expounded more easily and more plainly without transubstantiation; but the Church chose this sense, which is more hard, being moved thereunto, as it seemeth, chiefly because that of the sacraments men ought to hold as the holy Church of Rome holdeth.  But it holdeth that bread is transubstantiate or turned into the body, and wine into the blood..."

Cranmer sums up the last two bits of historical evidence:

Thus you have heard the cause, whereof this opinion of transubstantiation at this present is holden and defended among Christian people; that is to say, because the Church of Rome hath so determined; although the contrary, by the papists' own confession, appear to be more easy, more true, and more according to Scripture. 

As in our spiritual regeneration there can be no sacrament of baptism, if there be no water.  For as baptism is no perfect sacrament of spiritual regeneration, without there be as well the element of water, as the Holy Ghost spiritually regenerating the person that is baptized, (which is signified by the said water), even so the Supper of our Lord can be no perfect sacrament of spiritual food, except there be as well bread and wine, as the body and blood of our Saviour Christ spiritually feeding us, which by the said bread and wine is signified.

I'm afraid that Gabriel and Duns Scotus, if alive today, might be subject to the anathemas of Trent that followed less than a hundred years after their deaths, not to mention those church fathers (only a few of which have been cited) who did not conceive of the Supper as involving transubstantiation.

Eucharistic witness of the early fathers, part 1...

There's been quite a bit of debate going on over at The White Horse Inn Blog, both Here and Here, between Roman Catholics and Reformed Protestants.  Things have centered on the authority of Scripture, the place of tradition, the so-called infallibility of the teachings of the Roman Church, etc.  Some of the discussion have touched on the nature of the sacrament of the Lord' Supper.  I initially shared some thoughts on that in the earlier post Reformed and Catholic Eucharist.  I thought I'd add some additional snippets from one of the only two books the reformer and Arch-Bishop of the Church of England, Thomas Cranmer, wrote.  This book directly takes on the Roman view, which Cranmer argues is not consistent with Scripture nor with the early church fathers.

I'm under no illusions that what's posted here will convince someone who holds Rome's teachings to change their mind, and that's not my intention.  Yet not only Scripture, but early "tradition" seems to offer more than a few counter currents to be overcome by one contemplating a swim across the Tiber.  At a minimum Cranmer highlights a number of inconvenient historical nuggets mined from the early (and even later) church fathers.

Below are a few examples regarding the nature of the Lord's Supper that Thomas Cranmer, in his Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550) presents. Which book, by the way, was the principle work used against him by the Roman Church in order to convict him of heresy and burn him at the stake under Queen Mary.

This Irenaeus followeth the sense of Justinus wholly in this matter, saying, "that the bread wherein we give thanks to God, although it be of the earth, yet when the name of God is called upon, it is not then common bread, but the bread of thanksgiving, having two things in it, one earthly, and the other heavenly."  What meant he by the heavenly thing, but the sanctification which cometh by the invocation of the name of God?  And what by the earthly thing, but the very bread, which, as he said before, is of the earth, and which also, he saith, doth nourish our bodies, as other bread doth which we use?

Of Chyrsostom he writes:

And yet more plainly St Chrysostome declareth this matter in another place, saying:  "The bread, before it be sanctified, is called bread; but when it is sanctified by the means of the priest, it is delivered from the name of bread, and is exalted to the name of the Lord's body, although the nature of the bread doth still remain."

"The nature of bread," saith he, "doth still remain," to the utter and manifest confutation of the papists, which say that the accidents of bread do remain, but not the nature and substance.

Of Augustine he quotes:

 "The sacrifice of the Church consiteth of two things, of the visible kind of element, and of the invisible flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; both of the sacrament, and of the thing signified by the sacrament:  even as the person of Christ consisteth of God and man, forasmuch as he is very God and very man.  For everything containeth in it the very nature of those things whereof it consisteth.  Now the sacrifice of the Church consisteth of two things, of the sacrament, and of the thing thereby signified, that is to say, the body of Christ.  Therefore there is both the sacrament, and the thing of the sacrament, which is Christ's body."

Cranmer, like the continental Reformers, understood that the preaching of the word and the two sacraments of Baptism and the Supper as doing the same thing but in different ways.  Their commonality is in the spiritual nourishment they provide to the Lord's people by means of the gospel of Christ and the role that faith plays in both.  He writes:

And although our carnal generation and our carnal nourishment by known to all men by daily experience and by our common senses; yet this our spiritual generation and our spiritual nutrition be so obscure and hid unto us, that we cannot attain to the true and perfect knowledge and feeling of them, but only by faith, which must be grounded upon God's most holy word and sacraments.

And for this consideration our Saviour Christ hath not only set forth these things most plainly in his word, that we may hear them with our ears; but he hath also ordained one visible sacrament of spiritual regeneration in water, another visible sacrament in bread and wine, to the intent that , as much as is possible for man, we may see Christ with our eyes, smell him at our nose, taste him with our mouths, grope him with our hands, and perceive him with all our senses.  For as the word of God preached putteth Christ into our ears; so likewise the elements of water, bread, and wine, joined to God's word, do after a sacramental manner put Christ into our eyes, mouths, hands, and all our senses. 

 In Part 2 I'll follow up with more excerpts from the early writers as well as some of later periods that provide additional historical witness to the fact that tradition is far from being unified behind Rome on this matter.