“Louis’s insistence on taking the cross [in December 1244] and journeying to the Holy Land was an outgrowth of his deep faith and love for Christ. He yearned to see Jerusalem under Christian control once more. His desire was so great that he was prepared to risk his personal and royal fortunes on the expedition. He was sovereign of the wealthiest region in all Christendom and the king of the most populous Christian country. There was much to lose by going on Crusade, but King St. Louis IX knew that the eternal reward greatly outweighed the temporal risk.
The thirteenth-century was the “century of St. Louis,” as no man more exemplified the tenor of the age than the saintly king of the Franks. Louis was blond, slender, handsome, gentle though firm, decisive in policy and generous in charity. He was a devout and dutiful son and a loving husband and father. Along with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, Louis was the most important political figure of the thirteenth century and the central figure in Christendom. Those two men could not have been more opposite in all aspects of their lives. Frederick was the “Crusader without faith” whereas Louis was the “perfect Crusader.” One man seemed to eschew all religious faith, whereas the other embraced it and was declared a saint of the Church. Frederick kept a harem of Muslim women, whereas, uncharacteristic of the age for monarchy, Louis was a monogamous husband. Louis was a product of his times, but he also shaped the era in which he lived, and his influence (and intercession) continues to the modern world.
There was perhaps no greater king in the history of France. He governed his realm peacefully and justly for forty-four years, following three principles: devotion to God, self-discipline, and affection for his people. Even in an age of faith, the king’s personal piety and sanctity stood out. He wore simple clothing, especially after his return from the Crusade, and kept a regimented prayer life. He awoke each night at midnight to participate with his royal chaplains in the Liturgy of the Hours, and said fifty Hail Marys each evening, kneeling and standing for each prayer. Louis’s prayer life was augmented by penitential practices, including fasting, the wearing of a hair shirt, weekly confession, and the special personal mortification of not laughing on Fridays. He was concerned for his own salvation, but even more so for the salvation of his subjects, which he considered “his highest duty.”
-contemporary depiction ~1230 AD
…The Egyptian Campaign Begins
The French fleet arrived at Damietta on June 4, 1249, and once more the Muslim garrison prepared to fight Crusaders. The next morning, the Crusaders undertook an amphibious landing with Louis in the lead. When warriors waded to shore, the Muslim garrison commander, Fakhr al-Din, saw the strength of the Crusader army and decided to withdraw from the city to the sultan’s camp several miles away.
The city, now emptied of its defenders, was soon occupied by the French Crusaders in a surprisingly easy undertaking, which was the opposite of the siege during the Fifth Crusade [a 17-month siege in 1218-19]. Louis found stockpiles of food, equipment, and material that the Muslims left behind in their hasty retreat. The king decided to spend the summer in Damietta while waiting for his brother Alphonse and other Crusaders to arrive.
As winter approached, Louis thought an attack on Cairo would give the Christians complete control of Egypt and finish the task left undone by the Fifth Crusade, so he gave the command to march there in late November, 1249. He left a garrison and his five-months-pregnant queen in Damietta, and ordered the fleet to shadow the army’s movement offshore…”
I recently listened to a debate on sola scriptura between a Catholic apologist and a Baptist who runs an anti-Catholic organization. The Baptist claimed the Catholic Church did not decide the canon of the New Testament at the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419). As proof he alluded to the Muratorian Fragment, saying that, since it was far older than those councils and since it contains the New Testament canon as we know it, the issue was obviously settled long before the Catholic Church made any decisions. Is it true?
Answer:
The Baptist fellow is wrong and misled the audience. The Muratorian Fragment (so-called because it represents only a portion of the actual second-century document discovered in 1740 by Lodovico Antonio Muratori), is the oldest extant listing of New Testament-era books revered by early Christians. It was written sometime between 155 and 200. Patristic scholars believe the unknown author originally wrote the list in Greek (since the Latin is very poor), but the oldest copy available is an eighth-century Latin manuscript.
Although the Muratorian Fragment is important in studying how the early Church developed the New Testament canon, it doesn’t give exactly the same list of books that was later adopted as canonical at the councils of Hippo and Carthage. The Muratorian Fragment is just that: a fragment of a larger list of books which were considered canonical or quasi-canonical during the second century.
The Fragment itself provides us with a good though incomplete idea of this early canon. Virtually the entire New Testament canon as we know it is represented but not all of it: the Gospels of Luke and John (preceded by what seems to be an allusion to the Gospels of Matthew and Mark), Acts, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Romans, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, Philemon, Titus, 1 & 2 Timothy, Jude, two letters of John (since the fragment simply says “the two ascribed to John,” we don’t know which two of his three letters are meant), and Revelation.
The unknown author adds other non-canonical books to this lineup but makes clear these were not considered part of the canon: the so-called Pauline Epistles to the Laodiceans and to the Alexandrians (about which the Fragment’s author expresses his conviction that they were not authored by Paul), the Apocalypse of Peter, and the Shepherd of Hermas). The Fragment’s list is cut short abruptly with a final, enigmatic phrase which may indicate that the author had gone on to include still other non-inspired writings: “Those also who wrote the new book of psalms for Marcion, together with Basilides, the founder of the Asian Cataphrygians.”
As you can see, although the Muratorian Fragment lists most of the New Testament books, it’s missing a few (e.g. James, one of John’s epistles, most likely 3 John), and it also adds the book of Wisdom as canonical, which is very interesting from a Catholic perspective.
These facts demonstrate that, although the Fragment came close, it did not represent the actual canon of inspired Scripture. Further, there is no internal evidence in the document that it sought to represent any kind of official canon that was regarded by the Church as binding.
In the first four centuries of the Church many books, such as the seven letters of Ignatius, the Letter of Clement [the fourth pope] to the Corinthians, the Didache, and The Shepherd were revered by many Christians as inspired but were later shown to be non-inspired.
It was not until the Synod of Rome under Pope Damasus in A.D. 382, followed by the Councils of Hippo and Carthage, that the Catholic Church defined, albeit non-infallibly, which books made it into the New Testament and which didn’t. Probably the council fathers studied the (complete) Muratorian Fragment and other documents, including, of course, the books in question themselves, but it was not until these Councils that the Church officially settled the issue.
The plain fact of the matter is that the canon of the Bible was not settled in the first years of the Church. It was settled only after repeated (and perhaps heated) discussions, and the final listing was determined by the pope and Catholic bishops. This is an inescapable fact, no matter how many people wish to escape from it.”
-by Douglas Beaumont, Catholic Answers, Dr. Beaumont earned a Ph.D. in theology from North-West University and an M.A. in apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary, where he taught for many years before coming into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2014.
“When a skeptic argues against the Bible, he is usually not attacking the book but the ideas in the book. Skeptics are not really concerned about how many generations there are between Adam and Jesus or how many angels were at Jesus’ tomb. It is Christianity that concerns them (and hence the New Testament in particular). Since many Christians and skeptics alike consider the Bible to be the foundation of Christianity, to call its historicity, manuscript transmission, scientific accuracy, etc. into question is to call Christianity into question.
Defenses of Christianity, then, often either begin or conclude with a defense of the Bible. But what if the trustworthiness of the Bible could not be satisfactorily defended?
I don’t think this is the case, but it is worth thinking about for at least these two reasons: 1) most skeptics think the Bible has not been defended sufficiently, and 2) the case for Christianity will be even stronger if it can survive the failure of these popular methods. If the defense of Christianity is not coextensive with that of the Bible, then attacks on the latter can’t be used against the former.
I would argue that even if we lost the Bible completely, Christianity would remain undefeated. Therefore, the defeat of the Bible would not entail the defeat of Christianity.
How can we be sure of this?
First, Christianity preceded the Christian Bible. The New Testament writings did not begin until at least a decade after Christ started the Church, yet those who believed were Christians and therefore constituted the Church (1 Cor. 1:2 cf. 15:1-5).
Second, Christianity continued to exist without most of its members possessing the New Testament. Even after the New Testament started to be written and copied, its contents were not in the possession of the average believer. Even literate Christians would have to wait 1,500 years or so, when the printing press made bibles widely accessible. Even in our own time, people from many parts of the world become Christians when the Bible is forbidden or inaccessible in their own language. Yet Christianity has spread across the globe. It is possible, then, that Christianity’s message could have been communicated only orally through the ages.
Third, suppose some atheistic world dictator had every copy of the Bible destroyed and somehow made it impossible to create any future copies or to publish it online. Would Christianity disappear from the Earth? Of course not.
Before the New Testament was canonized, Christianity existed. Before it was completed, Christianity existed. Before its writing had even commenced, Christianity existed. It is, therefore, both a theoretical and a historical fact that Christianity can exist while no Bible exists.
All right, you ask: if the Bible is not necessary for Christianity’s existence, how would we know what Christianity teaches? As it turns out, we can find out pretty much everything necessary from a multitude of extra-biblical historical sources. These include:
Catechetical instructions (e.g., The Didache, first century)
Sermon messages (e.g., 1-2 Clement, A.D. 95-97)
Early epistles (e.g., Letters of Ignatius, A.D. 98-117)
Baptismal confessions (e.g., The Old Roman Creed, second to third century)
Bible commentaries (e.g., Theophilus’s, or the Diatessaron, second to third century)
Liturgical instructions (e.g., Liturgy of St. James or St. Basil, fourth century)
Authoritative pronouncements (e.g., ecumenical councils, canons, creeds, and definitions, fourth to fifth century).
We can see, then, that the content of Christianity, and thus most of the issues skeptics have with it, would remain even if the Bible was taken out of the equation. At a minimum, it is clear that the message that brought people into Christianity was from the very beginning that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died, was buried, and rose again. This was the message the apostles died for, the message the early Church was persecuted for, and that two centuries later brought the greatest empire on Earth to its knees.
So, ultimately, it is not the Bible but the historic Christian Church (which gave the world the canonical scriptures and their orthodox interpretation) that skeptics must defeat in order to bring Christianity down. This puts the Catholic apologist in a much stronger position than the Protestant, who must build his defense on the trustworthiness of just part of the Church’s tradition while rejecting others.
Now, this is not a reductionist attempt to shield theBible from legitimate criticism, and or a suggestion that we should abandon defense of the Bible. There is no need! The evidential arguments for the reliability of the Bible are extremely strong (so much so that if they are thought to fail the Bible, then, to be consistent, the rest of ancient history goes with it). If nothing else, it is difficult to imagine that God would bother inspiring hundreds of pages of communication only to have it lost or corrupted before it could be disseminated!
Still less is this an attempt to downplay the importance of the Bible for Catholics. The Church holds Sacred Scripture in the highest regard—reveres it, exhorts all believers to read it deeply.
Rather, it is good simply to realize that, even without the Bible, Christianity endures. This allows us, as circumstances may demand, to benefit from a different apologetic focus: to move from defending the Bible to defending the Church that produced it. This approach neatly sidesteps issues of biblical inspiration, transmission, inerrancy, and infallibility and opens the door to more accessible and accepted pieces of evidence. The skeptic’s target becomes both smaller and more difficult to hit—all without threat to Christianity’s teachings (which are, after all, the skeptic’s real prey).
Finally, lest someone think this is some sneaky Catholic sleight of hand, even the sixteenth-century Protestant scholar William Whitaker reluctantly admitted:
“I confess that the divine Providence can preserve from destruction whatever it chooses; . . . . we may, in the same manner, infer that there is no need of the scriptures, that everything should be trusted to divine Providence, and nothing committed to writing, because God can preserve religion safe without the scriptures.”“
-by Douglas Beaumont, Catholic Answers, Dr. Beaumont earned a Ph.D. in theology from North-West University and an M.A. in apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary, where he taught for many years before coming into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2014.
“All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14).
“Catholicism teaches that the doctrines contained in Sacred Scripture (the Bible) and Sacred Tradition (the Church) are authoritative because God’s revelation is the source of both. The Catechism puts it this way: “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture make up a single sacred deposit of the word of God” (97).
This means that “both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence” (82).
To some Protestants, this might sound blasphemous. The idea that anything the Church says could be on the same level as Scripture just doesn’t make sense. After all, only the Bible was inspired by God, right? How, then, can Catholics say that both must be reverenced equally?
More importantly, what happens if they come into conflict? The Protestant, in principle, does not face these difficulties because the Bible is said to hold the supreme place. As the ultimate and final level of religious authority, according to sola scriptura, when the Bible comes into conflict with any other authority it must be declared the winner.
“Where Is That in the Bible?”
Protestants hold to subtly different forms of sola scriptura. At one end of the spectrum, it is thought to mean that only the Bible may be trusted as a source for faith and practice—and so everything the Christian believes must be explicitly found in it. On the other end, it means that the Bible is simply the most trustworthy source, and so no teachings can explicitly contradict it.
Protestants’ objections to Catholic claims about Sacred Tradition will vary depending on which version of sola scriptura they hold. Some will argue that any addition of Tradition to the Bible is illicit, others will only see a problem if a particular tradition goes against Scripture. Either way, though Protestants are generally uncomfortable with an authoritative, big-T Church Tradition because they think it threatens the authority of Scripture.
Some Catholic assume that by sola scriptura Protestants mean anything not found in the Bible is off-limits for Christian faith and practice. This is not what it originally meant, but it is the way the principle is often understood by those on the more Fundamentalist end of the spectrum.
Most Protestants, though, realize that to hold such a position would be self-defeating. This is because if one believes that everything a Christian is to believe or practice must be taught in the Bible, then the teaching that everything a Christian is to believe or practice must be taught in the Bible must be taught in the Bible—but it isn’t.
Although some apologists for this more extreme version of sola scriptura may point to verses such as 2 Timothy 2:16-17—which says that all Scripture is inspired and useful—for support, such appeals to prooftexts are unconvincing. Nowhere in the Bible does it say clearly that Scripture alone is the source for all Christian faith and practice. Thus, Protestants who hold to any form of sola scriptura thereby show that at least one Christian belief (or two, if you include the canon) can be derived from something besides the Bible itself.
In Principle, Protestants Agree: Not everything that Christians are to believe must be taught explicitly in Scripture.
In Particular, Catholicism Affirms: Some things that Christians are to believe have been taught outside of Scripture.
REFLECT: Since it is practically unavoidable to believe things that are not taught in Scripture, how do we discern between them?”
“All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14).
-by Douglas Beaumont, Catholic Answers, Dr. Beaumont earned a Ph.D. in theology from North-West University and an M.A. in apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary, where he taught for many years before coming into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2014.
“We don’t even have to appeal to extra-Biblical doctrines or events to find accord with Protestants on the validity of extra-Biblical traditions—we can just use Scripture. In the New Testament, there are numerous affirmations of extra-Biblical traditions:
– The Old Testament does not name the magicians in Egypt who tried to discredit Moses, but Paul calls them Jannes and Jambres (2 Tim 3:8).
– Jude expects his readers to be aware that Michael the Archangel disputed with Satan over the body of Moses (verse 9) and that Enoch prophesied Christ (verse 14), but these stories are found nowhere else in Scripture.
– The writer of the book of Hebrews 11:37 talks about Old Testament saints being sawn in half for their faith—but he didn’t get this from the Old Testament.
And it is not just New Testament references to the Old Testament that seem to go beyond the Bible. In Acts 20:35, Paul quotes Jesus as saying, “It is more blessed to give than to receive”—yet Jesus is not recorded as having said this anywhere in the Gospels.
It seems apparent that the New Testament writers were not afraid to reference extra-biblical traditions.
This does not, of course, raise extra-biblical traditions to the level of inspiration—but it does show that unwritten traditions can be infallibly affirmed.
IN PRINCIPLE Protestants Agree: Traditions not recorded in Scripture can be infallibly affirmed (by Scripture).
IN PARTICULAR Catholicism Affirms: Traditions not recorded in Scripture can be infallibly affirmed (by the Church).
It is not uncommon to hear Protestants complain that Catholics added unbiblical traditions to what the Bible teaches. Sometimes they will even cite scriptures that disparage man-made traditions (e.g., Matthew 15:3–6). Doesn’t holding to traditions not taught by the Bible nullify the word of God?
The first thing to note here is that there is a big difference between something being non-biblical and it being anti-Biblical. Owning a cell phone is non-Biblical; worshipping an idol is anti-Biblical. Simply not appearing in the Bible doesn’t make something false. Moreover, numerous facets of Protestant worship are based on a denomination’s tradition rather than anything affirmed or commanded in Scripture.
For example, the idea of youth pastors, worship bands, meeting in Church buildings, or sitting in pews has no explicit support in Scripture. Most Protestants, however, recognize that not all Christian beliefs and practices are spelled out in the Bible. They realize that there is development and religious thought and that these sometimes lead to affirmations that, though extra-Biblical, are nonetheless authoritative.
To believe otherwise would be to reject the Church’s explanation of the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea, or the Council of Chalcedon’s definition of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. Indeed, it would threaten Protestantism itself, which is a development that did not come to exist until the sixteenth century. The real problem, then, comes when a religious group teaches something that is contrary to the Bible.
IN PRINCIPLE Protestants Agree: We can affirm beliefs and practices that aren’t explicit in Scripture but developed over time.
IN PARTICULAR Catholicism Affirms: The Church can teach doctrine and prescribe practices that aren’t explicitly found in Scripture but developed over time.”
“Melius enim iudicavit de malis benefacere, quam mala nulla esse permittere.” “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” –St Augustine
“O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem.” “O truly blessed night! This is the night in which, destroying the chains of death, Christ arose victorious from the grave. For it profited us not to be born if it had not profited us to be redeemed…” “O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer!” -“Exsultet” from the Easter Vigil
-by Father John Dowling, who is the pastor of St. Augustine Parish, Signal Mountain, TN. Father Dowling had been the pastor of Holy Ghost in Knoxville since 2014. His term at Holy Ghost was his second at the North Knoxville parish, having served there as associate pastor from 1987 to 1996 and as parochial administrator for the next year following the death of longtime pastor Father Albert Henkel. Father Dowling then became pastor of St. John Neumann in Farragut and was leading the parish when it constructed a large Romanesque church from 2006 to 2008. In February 2010, Father Dowling became pastor of St. Francis of Assisi in Fairfield Glade before his return to Holy Ghost.
A native of Savannah, Ga., Father Dowling also has a brother, Father Kevin Dowling, who is a priest in the Diocese of Nashville. Father John Dowling is a graduate of Notre Dame High School in Chattanooga who went on to work for five years in the marketing and sales department of the Chattanooga Coca-Cola Bottling Co. before entering seminary. He has written a number of booklets that include “Why Confess Your Sins to a Priest?” published by Liguori Publications in 1994. In 2005, the Fathers Dowling and Father Vann Johnston, now bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., received national honors for saving a father and two of his children from plunging over a waterfall while the three priests were on a hiking vacation in Montana.
“A doctor and canonized saint in the Catholic Church, Teresa of Avila, was making a perilous journey with other nuns and a priest to start a convent. Heavy rains turned into snow and sleet, the rivers were swollen, and the roads flooded. As they were going over a stream, the carriage swerved and stopped as it hung over the torrent. Afterwards, so the story goes, Teresa complained to the Lord about the perils that had been endured. He answered, “But that is how I treat my friends!” She replied, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them.”
A crusty cousin of mine who had experienced a lifetime of hardships was told by her more pious sister, “Well, you know that God only gives sufferings to those Whom He loves.” The curt reply: “Well, I sure do wish he’d lose his crush on me!”
From the educated and saintly to the more down-to-earth Christian, the problem of suffering beckons each person to penetrate its mysteriousness and discover its meaning. In fact, suffering seems to invite exploration of our own transcendence. John Paul II notes that “It is one of those points in which man is in a certain sense ‘destined’ to go beyond himself, and he is called to this in a mysterious way.”
Frustration, failure, rejection, physical pain, suffering, and death are common human experiences. Although we encounter much of this early in life, deeper questions about the human situation are often postponed until later years when plans, goals, expectations, and relationships are characterized by a greater intensity. We begin to ponder why some people experience more than their fair share of suffering. But since our experience of others’ misfortune is not first hand, we continue to go about our daily activities without fully probing the significance of physical and moral evil. It is inevitable, however, that some event immediately affecting us will become the occasion for deeper reflection regarding the mystery of human suffering. Why should there be talk about a “fair share” of suffering? Why should there be any suffering at all? Indeed, why did God let me suffer this? This more penetrating inquiry into the mystery of suffering which results from personal experience is but a prelude to more profound questions about the meaning of suffering. Why would God decide to create angels and men with the freedom to make choices that could result in their eternal damnation when He could have created and placed them in a condition of eternal bliss from the beginning of their existence? Why would God, Who needs no one and is perfectly happy and fulfilled, decide to create angels and men whose freedom to choose will result in His own suffering and death?
The Catholic response to why God created the world can be summed up in two words: His glory. This glory, which is the very essence of his Being, is perfectly revealed through the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. In order to explain why this is true we must reject the temptation to limit our search to history and travel back beyond the cross, beyond the Fall, and beyond creation itself.
Certainly, we acknowledge that the cross was necessary to pay the debt the human race owed to God. In meeting sin and its consequences head on, Jesus, as the new head of the race, gives witness to the seriousness of sin. By His faithful obedience until death, he establishes a new covenant in order that a renewed and authentic humanity may receive and share the blessings and promises of the kingdom of God.
True as this perspective is, it begs the following questions. Why did God allow the first parents to break this relationship through sin? Indeed, why did He initiate this relationship at all? To begin to answer these questions, we must go back “before” time and “beyond” space to a God who is. As we delve into the inner life of God, we discover one who lacks and needs nothing. We encounter a God who is a community of persons, perfectly giving, receiving, and abiding in the oneness of his life and love. Then we ask, Why would God, who always experiences a total giving and receiving in a Spirit-breathed Father-Son relationship, want a relationship with men at all, much less one that He knows will be severed by sin?
The difficulty that one has in understanding a God who creates people who can freely choose to be forever separated from Him pales in comparison to the awareness that we are in the presence of a God who freely creates a world that He knows will choose to kill Him. There is no guesswork here. From all eternity, this all-sufficient God knows that his powerful act of creating will make possible an act of hatred and destruction against himself.
Here we reach the heart of the problem. To summarize the difficulty of the situation, we might put it this way: Why does God create, knowing the tremendous amount of suffering, both temporal and eternal, that will result from human choices, and the immeasurable suffering He will have to experience as a result of these same human choices, when He could have created everyone in heavenly bliss and prevented any suffering at all? Why would God, filled with life and love, decide to set in motion the necessary elements for his own death when He does not need that which He freely chooses to create? Ultimately, the question is not, why do the good die young, the innocent suffer or bad things happen to good people but why do bad things happen to a good God? To answer this fundamental question we must reflect on two possible alternatives to the way God chose to create.
Some wonder why God did not choose to create a perfect world where human beings would always be kind to one another. In this world there would be no need for forgiveness because there would be no possibility of sin. Everyone would always be loving. There would be no spiritual, emotional or physical pain. Then, after a predetermined time, God would simply take us to heaven where he would reveal the fullness of his glory and bestow upon us our eternal reward.
This scenario becomes problematic for two reasons. First, we cannot speak of an eternal “reward” if while on earth we could do no wrong-we had to do good. No one receives a reward for doing something over which he has no control. In addition, when men saw how beautiful the heavenly life was they would begin to ask the obvious question. If we had to do good while on earth, why did God waste our time placing us there? We could have been in heaven from the beginning. What was the point? People would begin to resent such a God who could have created them in the fullness of heavenly joy immediately-but did not. A heaven filled with people who doubt God’s wisdom and resent having lived a meaningless existence on earth would not be a perfect place.
Once the shortcomings of this “perfect” plan become obvious, we consider a second alternative. Why didn’t God simply create us in heaven from the very beginning? Certainly, this was possible. God could have given us bodies incapable of experiencing pain or death and souls filled with his divine life from the very first moment of our existence. Once filled with his most bountiful blessings, we would praise God forever. For all eternity we would realize that since we were created out of nothing, God’s power transcends human comprehension. Therefore, we would praise him eternally for his awesome display of might.
Since God does not need our companionship because He is perfectly fulfilled in His own Trinitarian giving, receiving and abiding, His generosity and internal freedom would be manifested by His decision to create. Since God alone is eternal, men would recognize that nothing outside of God could compel Him to create. It would be obvious to all that no interior or exterior force compelled God to create. We would praise Him forever for his most generous gift of life and magnificent expression of freedom. We would marvel that God could bring about such harmony in the midst of such diversity. Knowing how every.aspect of each person blends perfectly with all others would give us an overwhelming sense of security and comfort. We could rejoice for all eternity contemplating such a wise and providential God.
Still, although we who were created in heaven would truly appreciate God’s power, generosity, freedom, wisdom, and providence, we would forever ask the question, “How much does God’s creative power, generous freedom, inscrutable wisdom, and all-encompassing providence reveal about himself?” In other words, notwithstanding the power, generosity, freedom, wisdom and providence expressed in God’s creating angels and men in heavenly bliss, both would forever wonder if God’s life were greater still.
The most important question would still remain unanswered. “Does God love us? We know he created us and He didn’t have to. Yes, we know that He has the power to keep us in existence for-ever. Yes, we know that He can reveal to us exactly how we fit into his eternal plan.” But that which is most meaningful about a person’s identity would remain a mystery. Does this all-powerful and generous God who freely creates us according to a wise and providential plan truly love us? How would we ever know? What can God, Who has everything and can do everything, do to prove that He loves us? In order to express love it must cost the lover something. God seems to be in a dilemma since of His very nature he is incapable of losing anything. How can God prove His love when nothing causes Him strain or pain?
For all eternity God could say, “But look what I’ve given you here—billions of friends, beautiful scenery, effortless movement, immense power at your disposal and the freedom to explore my life forever.” Yet we would always wonder, “Yes, but what did it cost you? For that matter, what did it cost any of us? What sacrifice did anyone make in order for us to be here? There really is no evidence that you or anyone else in heaven is capable of love.” A heaven filled with people who doubt if God or others love them is not a perfect place.
God’s answer is to create a world that will nail Him to the cross. The author of life will experience death on a cross in order to reveal how deep love is. Why is this so? Anything short of death itself would fail to reveal the depth of God’s love.
Creation, miracles, commandments, prophets, and kings would all fail to reveal fully a love that has no bounds. Even Christ’s birth and public ministry would fail to reveal perfectly the height, breadth and depth of God’s love. But in Christ’s death, justice and mercy meet. By Christ’s sacrifice on the cross sin is conquered, death is swallowed up, order is restored and justice is applied through the love and mercy of one Who did not know sin and yet became sin so that we might become the very righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). By accepting death on the cross (Luke 23:46), Christ fully embraces the infinite love and eternal plan of the Father for Himself and those “who have been called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28). By accepting death on the cross, Christ has revealed his sacrificial love for each one of us (Gal. 2:20). Through the humanity of Christ, and by reason of its union with the Word, creation is able to embrace and reflect the infinite love of God. As the Italian theologian Raniero Cantalamessa states in The Meaning of Christmas, “God wanted the Incarnation of his Son not so much to have someone outside Himself to love Him in a way that would be worthy of Him, as to have someone outside Himself to love in a way that would be worthy of Him, that is, without limit! . . . The Father had someone to love outside the Trinity in a supreme and infinite way, because Jesus is man and God at the same time.”
We now are prepared to understand the “necessity” of the cross of Jesus Christ. This is seen from two perspectives. First, from the perspective of human activity, God’s glory is more fully revealed in his handiwork, created and redeemed in Christ Jesus “for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph.2:10). Insofar as Jesus Christ is human, we acknowledge that, “Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered; and being made perfect he became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey him” (Heb.5:8-9). In order to be identified with the Son as children of God, we must listen to God when he tells us “It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?” (Heb. 12:7), “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him” (Rom. 8:17).
In light of the cross Jesus becomes the new head of a renewed and authentic mankind capable of making its own contribution to the work of salvation. Paul’s words confirm this: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church” (Col.1:24). This ability for one who suffers to cooperate with Christ in the building up of his body, the Church, under the influence of the Holy Spirit does not detract from but rather manifests God’s glory. Irenaeus summarizes this first perspective: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”
Second, from the perspective of God’s self-revelation, by using the cross to redeem men and empower them to make their own contribution to the work of salvation rather than simply creating them in heaven, God better reveals his inscrutable wisdom. Everyone truly has his own place in the Father’s kingdom while at the same time realizing it has been prepared by Jesus Himself.
Moreover, the paschal mystery alone enables God to reveal His absolute freedom. No greater freedom can be imagined than that which is expressed by the all-sufficient God creating a world from which He could derive no benefit, knowing with certainty that He would experience the weight of the sins of the world and death by its hands as a result of his choice. By redeeming men through the cross, God reveals a power and a providence that go beyond creating something good out of nothing and sustaining it. The cross of Jesus Christ has the power to bring good out of evil. It is difficult to imagine how God creates out of nothing. Even more difficult to imagine and impossible to comprehend is how God is able to incorporate the human capacity to choose evil into a wisdom, providence, freedom, and power that guarantees the victory.
In the cross of Jesus Christ, God reveals a love that goes beyond benevolence. On the cross the worst evil history would ever know was committed. On the cross the greatest love history would ever know was revealed. On the cross God grants us sinners an eternal acquittal at the same time that we are giving him the death penalty. The cost of this love cannot be measured nor its quality enhanced. In Christ, because of the hypostatic union (Christ’s divine and human natures united in his divine Person), man has been given the capacity to accept all that the Father can give (John 5:20) and perfectly reveal the Father’s life (John 14:9, 17:7-8). Jesus, being the Word and truth, is the wisdom of the Father and is capable of expressing God’s mysterious plan while accepting this same mystery Himself and faithfully carrying it out. Ironically, by His sacrificial death Christ fully accepts and reveals the Father’s sacrificial love for the world (John 3:16). This death brings to fulfillment the meaning of the psalm that says, “Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints” (Ps. 116:15).
Human suffering is indeed a mystery that never will be comprehended because it is related to the mystery of God’s love revealed through the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Two passages from Paul help reconcile the Church’s teaching that the world is created for the glory of God with the mystery of human suffering revealed in the cross: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ Who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, Who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:19b-20), and, “For it is the God Who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ Who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).
The cross enables us to know a love and a power that go far beyond what the act of creating men in heavenly glory could reveal. It permits us to be drawn into an even deeper heavenly communion with a God who manifests his glory in such an extreme way. The more God reveals of His inner life, the more we can experience it. Rather than creating us in heaven God uses the cross to perfectly reveal his wisdom, freedom, power, and providence. It is God’s love and His merciful expression of that love which give the cross its radical power and conveys its ultimate purpose. Again, we call on Irenaeus as we summarize this second fundamental perspective: “The life of man is the vision of God.”
Because Jesus shares our humanity, the cross becomes God’s way of allowing us to cooperate in our own redemption. Because Jesus is one in being with the Father, the cross is God’s way of revealing a love the depths of which will take an eternity to explore. The Father’s “foreknowledge” of the love that the Son will embrace, empowering Him to abandon Himself to the Father’s will (John 6:38), to unite all things in Him (Eph. 1:10), and to present the kingdom to the Father “that God may be everything to everyone” (1 Cor. 15:28), is the ultimate reason why God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).
Through the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, God reveals that “the glory of God is man fully alive” and “the life of man is the vision of God.” This revelation is anticipated at the Last Supper when Jesus says, “Now, Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was made” (John 17:5). This revelation will reach its culmination with the Second Coming of Jesus, when God will be “everything to everyone” (1 Cor. 15:28). Between these two events stands the cross. The cross of Christ forever marks us as obedient disciples of Jesus who “consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18). It will enable a real communion of love to exist in heaven among people who have not simply been placed there by God but have loved one another joyfully, served one another faithfully, worked for one another tirelessly, prayed for one another, and contributed to one another’s salvation. Conversely, it will reveal the depth of meaning contained in the biblical phrase “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16) and, as the ultimate sign of contradiction, forever show why bad things happened to a good God!”
-by Jimmy Akin, a former Presbyterian, Jimmy is a convert to the Faith and has an extensive background in the Bible, theology, the Church Fathers, philosophy, canon law, and liturgy.
“It’s no secret that a lot of people disagree with the Church’s teaching on various points. Nor is it a surprise. The Church, like Christ, has always been “a sign that is spoken against” (Luke 2:34).
What is surprising—and scandalous—is that in our age many professing Catholics reject Church teaching, even teaching regarded as infallible. The most famous example is the Church’s teaching on contraception, about which opinion polls reveal widespread dissent.
Sometimes those seeking to justify this dissent argue that the Church’s teaching on contraception has not been “received” by the faithful and therefore is not authoritative. (More recently, Fr. James Martin proposed a similar argument concerning homosexual behavior.)
What are they talking about?
Reception and the Sense of the Faithful
After reviewing how the Holy Spirit assists the Church when it defines a teaching as infallible, the fathers of the Second Vatican council stated:
To these definitions the assent of the Church can never be wanting, on account of the activity of that same Holy Spirit, by which the whole flock of Christ is preserved and progresses in unity of faith (Lumen Gentium 25).
The council taught that the Holy Spirit preserves the flock of Christ in the unity of faith. And so, when the Magisterium infallibly defines a teaching, the Holy Spirit guides the faithful to accept—or “receive”—that teaching.
This process of reception reflects what theologians have called the “sense of the faithful” (sensus fidelium) or the “sense of faith” (sensus fidei). According to Vatican II:
The whole body of the faithful . . . cannot err in matters of belief. This characteristic is shown in the supernatural appreciation of faith (sensus fidei) on the part of the whole people, when, from the bishops to the last of the faithful, they manifest a universal consent in matters of faith and morals (Lumen Gentium 12; CCC 92).
The Holy Spirit thus gives the Church—including the ordinary faithful—a supernatural sense of what constitutes the true faith, and when the Magisterium infallibly defines a point of faith, the Holy Spirit guides the Church’s members to accept it.
Clarifying the “Sense of the Faithful”
In the debate over contraception that followed Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, dissenters argued that so many Catholics rejected its teaching that the process of reception had not occurred, and so the teaching was not accurate or authoritative. They even used quotations from Vatican II—like the ones we have just seen—to argue their point.
This led defenders of the Church’s teaching to try to clarify the proper role of the sense of the faithful. One point they made was that the process of reception is just that: a process. You can’t look at the immediate reaction to a teaching as a definitive guide. You have to give the Holy Spirit time to do his work in guiding the faithful.
Over time, a number of documents appeared that treated the subject of reception and the sense of the faithful. One of the most thorough was produced by the International Theological Commission (ITC), an advisory body run by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith whose documents are published only if they are theologically orthodox.
The ITC on Reception
The ITC noted, despite the generally smooth reception of magisterial teachings:
There are occasions, however, when the reception of magisterial teaching by the faithful meets with difficulty and resistance, and appropriate action on both sides is required in such situations.
The faithful must reflect on the teaching that has been given, making every effort to understand and accept it. Resistance, as a matter of principle, to the teaching of the Magisterium is incompatible with the authentic sensus fidei.
The Magisterium must likewise reflect on the teaching that has been given and consider whether it needs clarification or reformulation in order to communicate more effectively the essential message (Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Churchn. 80).
Conditions for the Sense of the Faithful
The ITC pointed out that just because a person is a Catholic doesn’t mean he is authentically displaying a true sense of faith. The fact that Catholics disagree on various points guarantees that they can’t all be right, and it’s obvious that some Catholics are more faithful than others.
Through his work in our lives, God offers all the baptized guidance in discerning truth from falsehood, but we still have free will, and so we must cooperate with his work for this guidance to bear fruit. The commission thus identified a set of criteria that an individual needs to authentically participate in the sense of faith:
a. Participation in the life of the Church
b. Listening to the word of God
c. Openness to reason
d. Adherence to the Magisterium
e. Holiness—humility, freedom, and joy
f. Seeking the edification of the Church
All of these are common sense:
If a person was baptized Catholic but subsequently has never darkened a church door, he is so disconnected from his Faith that he can’t be said to display a supernatural sense of faith.
The Faith is contained in the word of God, and so a willingness to listen to Scripture and Tradition is needed.
A person who is unreasonable, who is determined to hold his opinions regardless of the arguments brought forward, is not displaying the discernment needed to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Christ gave us a Magisterium, and a person who fundamentally refuses to listen to it is not authentically faithful.
Holiness is a key goal of God’s work in our lives, and a person who doesn’t seek and display holiness is not cooperating with that work.
God guides individuals to build up or edify their fellow Christians, so someone fundamentally oriented toward creating division and dis-edification is not cooperating with him.
Opinion Polls and the Sense of the Faithful
In many parts of the world, America included, most Catholics don’t even go to Mass on a regular basis. They thus don’t seem to have the level of involvement in their Faith needed to meet even the first criterion laid out by the ITC.
When you consider how few Catholics display all the qualities listed above, it is clear that polls cannot be relied on as a guide to the sense of the faithful. Thus the ITC comments that one can’t identify the sense of the faithful with public opinion:
I) First of all, the sensus fidei is obviously related to faith, and faith is a gift not necessarily possessed by all people, so the sensus fidei can certainly not be likened to public opinion in society at large.
Then also, while Christian faith is, of course, the primary factor uniting members of the Church, many different influences combine to shape the views of Christians living in the modern world.
As the above discussion of dispositions shows, the sensus fidei cannot simply be identified, therefore, with public or majority opinion in the Church, either. Faith, not opinion, is the necessary focus of attention.
Opinion is often just an expression, frequently changeable and transient, of the mood or desires of a certain group or culture, whereas faith is the echo of the one gospel that is valid for all places and times.
II) In the history of the people of God, it has often been not the majority but rather a minority that has truly lived and witnessed to the faith. The Old Testament knew the “holy remnant” of believers, sometimes few in number, over against the kings and priests and most of the Israelites. . . .
In many countries today, Christians are under strong pressure from other religions or secular ideologies to neglect the truth of faith and weaken the boundaries of ecclesial community. It is therefore particularly important to discern and listen to the voices of the “little ones who believe” (Mark 9:42) (n. 118).
Therefore, we need to think twice before taking the latest poll—whether about contraception or anything else—as a sign that a particular Church teaching has not been “received” by the faithful and so we don’t have to assent to it.
Obviously, many who dissent from Church teaching are regular churchgoers who may meet multiple criteria identified by the ITC. Nevertheless, the fundamental point remains: the true sense of faith is displayed by those who are authentically faithful—not simply those who are baptized.”
O sacrum convivium!
in quo Christus sumitur:
recolitur memoria passionis eius:
mens impletur gratia:
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
Alleluia.
O sacred banquet!
in which Christ becomes our food,
the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.
Alleluia.
“If the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life” (CCC 1324), then it matters how we think and pray about it. Repeated prayers, such as the Our Father, teach us how to pray (cf. Luke 11:1) through the repetition of familiar words and postures. And so, several times a day, the friars recite the above antiphon, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. How might these words of Saint Thomas Aquinas teach us?
O Sacred Banquet. The banquet is a common image, ideally calling to mind the Wedding Feast in Revelation 19. In the Mass itself, the priest says, “Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.” Still, given present circumstances, we might balk at this opening. It seems too much talk of a meal among friends could reduce the altar of sacrifice to a table, the Sacrament to a symbol, and the supernatural reality to a self-enclosed communion of attendees. Since last year’s poll projected that only a third of U.S. Catholics believe in transubstantiation, we urgently need clear Eucharistic teaching. Haven’t we heard enough about banquets and tables?
First, the O Sacred Banquet seems designed to teach; it’s a mini-creed of Eucharistic faith. In four steps, it clarifies what (or Who) this Sacred Banquet is:
Christ becomes our food. Aquinas writes: “The effect of this sacrament [here, grace] ought to be considered, first of all and principally, from what is contained in this sacrament, which is Christ” (ST III q.79 a.1). Only the doctrine of transubstantiation accounts for Christ’s sermon at Capernaum (John 6:22-59) and his unqualified words: “Take, eat; this is my body” (Matt 26:26). The memory of his Passion is celebrated. The Mass is a re-presentation, in an unbloody mode, of the One Sacrifice on Calvary, when the same “blood of the covenant” was “poured out” for our sins (Matt 26:27-28). The soul is filled with grace. Through the sacraments the Holy Spirit makes us “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:3-4), even in this life. But the pledge of future glory is given to us: while we await “the glory that is to be revealed” (Rom 8:18), we possess here a foretaste of Heaven.
Notably, the O Sacred Banquet puts all four of its verbs in the present tense: through the unique efficacious signs instituted by Christ, past, present, and future are signified, now, for our sanctification (ST III q. 60 a. 3). Again, there’s a whole theology in this one prayer.
Lastly, the “sacred banquet” language is not just a cliché. Aristotle famously wrote that human friendship takes a certain amount of “eating salt together,” that is, of time and familiarity around a shared table (Nicomachean Ethics VIII.3). But when the Church speaks of the supper of the Lamb, she means primarily our communion with God, which is the basis for (and inseparable from) our communion as believers.
This idea, divine friendship, seemed foolish to the Philosopher. He thought there was such inequality between gods and men that they cannot be friends, and “do not even expect to be so” (Ethics VIII.7). True: God and human beings are not equals. But Jesus has revealed a new vocation for us: “No longer do I call you servants … but I have called you friends” (John 15:15). This charity which He offers, this “friendship of man for God” (ST II-II q.23 a.1), fulfills all true communion in the one Body of Christ.
Because the Eucharistic gift of divine friendship is the source of our human friendship in religious life, we friars need to turn to our Lord with these words throughout the day. But, in today’s world, a more widespread use of this devotion could “teach us how to pray.” It would be a constant reminder of the con-vivium, the life shared between God and man, given to us in this Sacred Banquet.”
“Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ. . . . They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.” –St Ignatius of Antioch (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 6:2-7:1 [A.D. 110]).
“We call this food Eucharist. . . . For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus.” –St Justin Maryr (First Apology 66 [A.D. 151]).
“All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer” (Acts 1:14).
-by Douglas Beaumont, Catholic Answers, Dr. Beaumont earned a Ph.D. in theology from North-West University and an M.A. in apologetics from Southern Evangelical Seminary, where he taught for many years before coming into full communion with the Catholic Church in 2014.
“Is “Faith Alone” enough?
The Protestant Reformation was launched when a Catholic priest named Martin Luther thought he’d discovered something in the Bible that the Church had been missing for centuries. That discovery was salvation by faith alone—that is, apart from doing good works. This core Reformation doctrine of sola fide is a major dividing line between Catholics and Protestants.
Just like sola scriptura, this doctrine ends up dividing Protestants from each other just as much (and sometimes even more) as it divides them from Catholics. Over the years, “faith alone” has come to mean different things to different Protestants.
There are some (known as Free Grace Protestants) who have taken the principle so far that they believe even apostates can be completely confident in their salvation. At the other end of the spectrum are legalistic or Fundamentalist groups that, while giving lip service to salvation by faith alone, nevertheless demand a severe lifestyle from their members.
Nor is the debate over salvation by faith alone limited to extreme fringe groups. In fact, it began in the sixteenth century and shows no signs of letting up in the twenty-first. A recent book from one of the most popular Evangelical publishers devoted over 300 pages to an academic debate between five scholars on the nature of justification (one was a Catholic)
And justification is only the beginning. Similar debate books have been written about sanctification, pluralism, eternal security, law and gospel, and other related topics. And so as we seek accord, we will look to see if the principles that allow Protestants who disagree over salvation nonetheless to identify with one another and to worship together might call for the embrace of Catholics as well.
Are You Saved?
Justification, Sanctification, and Glorification
Although Christians sometimes think of salvation in fairly simple terms (going to heaven instead of hell), anyone who spends much time thinking or talking about the subject will quickly discover that there are numerous shades of meaning.
Nearly all Christians, even those who speak of salvation as if it occurred whole and entire at a single point in time, with no potential to ever be lost, recognize that God’s work in people typically involves a process that is extended over time.
In the Evangelical tradition that I came from, we thought of salvation in three basic stages: 1) justification, which was the point at which someone received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and thus was guaranteed heaven, 2) sanctification, which was the process by which God transformed the individual’s life from one of sin to sainthood, and 3) glorification, which was the final, complete transformation into perfection that occurred once someone entered eternal life in heaven.
Stages of Salvation
Where we differ, where we agree
Although this threefold process is described differently among Protestant traditions, most affirm something like it. A critical feature of this theology is that during each stage, the causes of and effects on one’s salvation can differ. For example, whereas the initial stage of salvation (“ justification”) might be considered a one-way act of God based on faith alone, resulting in heaven or hell, the second stage (“sanctification”) may rely heavily on the actions of the individual and only affect one’s degree of reward or punishment.
The importance of these salvation “stages” is that although Protestants will often speak of salvation as a single moment in time with everlasting effects, most agree that there is more to the story. Sola fide, in most Protestant minds, refers only to one’s initial justification. This happens to coincide nicely with the Catholic view of baptism—it is entirely faith-based, distinct from a person’s works, and instantly brings us into a saving relationship with God.
For many Protestants, the parallels break down after that because the Church teaches that saving grace can be lost or increased via works (“faith working through love” per Galatians 5:6)—but there are Protestants who teach something similar to this as well. In the end, the differences some- times come down more to terminology and fine-grained distinctions than to entirely different salvation plans as is often believed.
Finding Common Ground
We often are not as far apart as we think
In Principle Protestants Agree: Salvation is in some sense a process involving various stages, each with different requirements and effects.
In Particular Catholicism Affirms: Salvation is an ongoing process with different requirements at different stages that can increase, decrease, eradicate, or regain God’s saving grace in our lives.”
Love, and Christian accord, harmony, peace, love, and deep, true affection,
Matthew
“Catholics argue that when Jesus said at the Last Supper, “This is my body . . . This is my blood” (Matt. 26:26, 28), He literally meant for bread to become His Body and wine His Blood.
But a Protestant might object: “Wait a minute. If we take the bread and wine to be really Jesus’ body and blood because He says, ‘This is My body . . . This is My blood,’ then we’re gonna have to say Paul meant the rock that followed the Israelites in the wilderness to be really Jesus, since he says, ‘the Rock was Christ’ (1 Cor. 10:4). But most Christians don’t believe the rock really was Jesus, like Catholics believe the consecrated host really is Jesus’ Body. Therefore, we shouldn’t take Jesus to mean that the bread and wine really became His Body and Blood because He says, ‘This is my body . . . This is my blood.’”
What should we make of this objection?
First, the appeal to 1 Corinthians 10:4 doesn’t show that Jesus’ use of “is” must be taken figuratively. It only shows that the verb “is” can be taken figuratively. As such, this argument only gets as far as saying a figurative interpretation, like in 1 Corinthians 10:4, is possible.
But this is a moot point, because Catholics could agree that Jesus’ words “This is my body . . . This is my blood” taken by themselves can be interpreted literally or figuratively. There’s nothing in the words themselves that determines one interpretation over the other. So, Catholics need have no qualms with saying these words could be taken figuratively when they’re considered in isolation from other evidence.
Second, the objection demands that a Catholic should interpret Jesus’ use of the verb “to be” at the Last Supper like it’s used in 1 Corinthians 10:4—figuratively, the reason being that it’s supposedly obvious that bread and wine can’t be Jesus’ body and blood. However, such a demand would be common only on the supposition that Jesus is not performing a miracle.
For example, I might hold up a picture of my father and say, “This is my father,” and you know that the picture is not literally my father but a figure of him. But—and here’s the key—your conclusion would be based on the assumption, and a true one at that, that I’m not performing the miracle of making my father substantially present under the form of ink and paper.
Similarly, to interpret Jesus’ use of “is” at the Last Supper figuratively would be natural if we already knew he’s not performing a miracle. But if there is evidence that what Jesus is doing at the Last Supper is miraculous, then a literal interpretation would be a viable option, and even a more probable one.
And there is an abundance of such evidence. Due to the limited space here, however, we’re only going to consider some of the evidence.
When Jesus first made the promise to give His Flesh to eat in John 6:51-52, He did so against the backdrop of the manna of old: “Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die . . . the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is My Flesh.”
This bread that God gave in the wilderness was not ordinary bread. It was miraculous bread:
It was bread that rained from heaven (Exod. 16:4).
It appeared every day with the coming of the “dew” (Exod. 16:13)
It never lasted more than a day, except on the Sabbath. When the Israelites didn’t obey the instruction to leave none until the next day, it “bred worms and became foul” (Exod. 16:19-20).
It didn’t appear on the Sabbath. And the amount they gathered on the sixth day did not breed worms and become foul (Exod. 16:22-26).
It appeared every day for forty years, and only stopped upon the Israelites entering the promised land (Exod. 16:35; Joshua 5:10-12).
A jar with an omer’s worth was kept in the Israelite’s sanctuary “throughout the generations” (Exod. 16:31-34)
As bible scholar Brant Pitre argues in his book Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, to say the Eucharist at the Last Supper, the New Manna, is merely a symbol, we’d have to conclude that the Old Manna in the wilderness was superior to the New, since miraculous bread is clearly greater than ordinary bread. But that’s a no-go in biblical theology. The New Testament fulfillment is always greater than the Old Testament type.
Therefore, the Eucharist at the Last Supper couldn’t have been ordinary bread, which is what it would have to have been on the view that Jesus was speaking metaphorically. Rather, there’s something supernatural to it. And that supernatural quality allows for us to interpret literally the words of institution (“This is my body . . . this is my blood”), meaning that the bread and wine became his body and blood.
That the Eucharist is supernatural is further confirmed by Jesus’ teaching that faith is required to accept His command to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. Jesus prefaces His revelation that His Flesh is the bread of life by saying, “No one can come to Me unless the Father Who sent Me draws him” (v.44). Then, after giving His discourse about eating His flesh and drinking His blood, He says, “There are some of you that do not believe . . . This is why I told you that no one can come to Me unless it is granted Him by my Father” (v.64-65). If Jesus begins and concludes His remarks about eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood with faith, a gift that only the Father can give, then Jesus is revealing that faith is required to accept His teaching.
There’s something else that Jesus says which reveals the requirement of faith: “It is the Spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and Life” (v.63).
“The flesh” is a New Testament phrase that is often used to describe human nature apart from God’s grace (Mark 14:38, Rom. 8:1-14, 1 Cor. 2:14-3:1). What Jesus means is that without God’s grace, and in particular the grace of faith, acceptance of Jesus’ command to eat his flesh and drink his blood is impossible. If his disciples are to believe his teaching, they must avail themselves of that grace.
Jesus’ statement about his words being “spirit and life” mean that his teaching is of the Spirit and therefore can be accepted only by the power of the Spirit. This makes sense of why Jesus’ command to eat his flesh and drink his blood is bookended by his teachings about faith (v.44, 65).
Since what Jesus says in John 6 is a promise of what will be fulfilled at the Last Supper, and he teaches that faith is required to accept what he says, it follows that faith would also be required when confronted with the words at the Last Supper: “This is my body . . . This is my blood.”
Now, what need would there be for faith if the bread and wine at the Last Supper were intended by Christ to merely represent or signify his body and blood? Faith would not be needed to believe that bread and wine serve as a symbol of Jesus’ body and blood. But faith would be needed if the bread and wine became his body and blood, which, of course, would be miraculous.
Since Jesus teaches that faith is required to accept what He says about the bread and wine being His body and blood, it follows that there is a supernatural dimension to the Eucharist. And if the Eucharist is supernatural, then we have good reason to not automatically take Jesus’ words to be metaphorical. The supernatural nature of the Eucharist makes the literal interpretation a viable option.
Given the supernatural nature of the Eucharist, there’s no need for a Catholic to give up his literal interpretation of Jesus’ use of the verb “is” in favor of a figurative interpretation as we see in 1 Corinthians 10:4. The two cases are disanalogous, and thus cannot be read in light of each other. Catholics, therefore, don’t have to settle for the ridiculous claim that Jesus became a rock in the wilderness in order to keep our literal interpretation of the words of institution: “This is My Body . . . this is My Blood.”
“Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ. . . . They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.” –St Ignatius of Antioch (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 6:2-7:1 [A.D. 110]).
“We call this food Eucharist. . . . For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus.” –St Justin Maryr (First Apology 66 [A.D. 151]).
Summa Catechetica, "Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam." – St Anselm, "“Si comprehendus, non est Deus.” -St Augustine, "Let your religion be less of a theory, and more of a love affair." -G.K. Chesterton, “When we pray we speak to God; but when we read, God speaks to us.” -St Jerome, "As the reading of bad books fills the mind with worldly and poisonous sentiments; so, on the other hand, the reading of pious works fills the soul with holy thoughts and good desires." -St. Alphonsus Liguori, "And above all, be on your guard not to want to get anything done by force, because God has given free will to everyone and wants to force no one, but only proposes, invites and counsels." –St. Angela Merici, “Yet such are the pity and compassion of this Lord of ours, so desirous is He that we should seek Him and enjoy His company, that in one way or another He never ceases calling us to Him . . . God here speaks to souls through words uttered by pious people, by sermons or good books, and in many other such ways.” —St. Teresa of Avila, "I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men and women who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, and who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity… I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism, and where lie the main inconsistences and absurdities of the Protestant theory.” (St. John Henry Newman, “Duties of Catholics Towards the Protestant View,” Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England), "We cannot always have access to a spiritual Father for counsel in our actions and in our doubts, but reading will abundantly supply his place by giving us directions to escape the illusions of the devil and of our own self-love, and at the same time to submit to the divine will.” —St. Alphonsus Ligouri, "The harm that comes to souls from the lack of reading holy books makes me shudder . . . What power spiritual reading has to lead to a change of course, and to make even worldly people enter into the way of perfection." –St. Padre Pio, "Screens may grab our attention, but books change our lives!" – Word on Fire, "Reading has made many saints!" -St Josemaría Escrivá, "Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you." —St. Jerome, from his Letter 22 to Eustochium, "Encounter, not confrontation; attraction, not promotion; dialogue, not debate." -cf Pope Francis, "God here speaks to souls through…good books“ – St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, "You will not see anyone who is really striving after his advancement who is not given to spiritual reading. And as to him who neglects it, the fact will soon be observed by his progress.” -St Athanasius, "To convert someone, go and take them by the hand and guide them." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP. 1 saint ruins ALL the cynicism in Hell & on Earth. “When we pray we talk to God; when we read God talks to us…All spiritual growth comes from reading and reflection.” -St Isidore of Seville, “Also in some meditations today I earnestly asked our Lord to watch over my compositions that they might do me no harm through the enmity or imprudence of any man or my own; that He would have them as His own and employ or not employ them as He should see fit. And this I believe is heard.” -GM Hopkins, SJ, "Only God knows the good that can come about by reading one good Catholic book." — St. John Bosco, "Why don't you try explaining it to them?" – cf St Peter Canisius, SJ, Doctor of the Church, Doctor of the Catechism, "Already I was coming to appreciate that often apologetics consists of offering theological eye glasses of varying prescriptions to an inquirer. Only one prescription will give him clear sight; all the others will give him at best indistinct sight. What you want him to see—some particular truth of the Faith—will remain fuzzy to him until you come across theological eye glasses that precisely compensate for his particular defect of vision." -Karl Keating, "The more perfectly we know God, the more perfectly we love Him." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP, ST, I-II,67,6 ad 3, “But always when I was without a book, my soul would at once become disturbed, and my thoughts wandered." —St. Teresa of Avila, "Let those who think I have said too little and those who think I have said too much, forgive me; and let those who think I have said just enough thank God with me." –St. Augustine, "Without good books and spiritual reading, it will be morally impossible to save our souls." —St. Alphonsus Liguori "Never read books you aren't sure about. . . even supposing that these bad books are very well written from a literary point of view. Let me ask you this: Would you drink something you knew was poisoned just because it was offered to you in a golden cup?" -St. John Bosco " To teach in order to lead others to faith is the task of every preacher and of each believer." —St. Thomas Aquinas, OP. "Prayer purifies us, reading instructs us. Both are good when both are possible. Otherwise, prayer is better than reading." –St. Isidore of Seville “The aid of spiritual books is for you a necessity.… You, who are in the midst of battle, must protect yourself with the buckler of holy thoughts drawn from good books.” -St. John Chrysostom
