re: Happy Reformation Day!

These threads are always full of half truths, lies, anger, narcissism, profanity, blasphemy, etc…. All the vices which Satan loves and champions.

Christianity is the belief that Christ is the way the truth and the life. The son of the living God. God made flesh, put to death unjustly for our sins, and granting all of us salvation and hope in his resurrection.

The Church is all of us as a community united in that belief.

The squabbling about which little passage justifies your specific belief vs another’s reading of a line or which human tradition trumps which other tradition is all from the devil. The division about which human invented name or human appointed person we should follow is absolute nonsense.

The more we fight each other instead of the devil the more the devil wins. The world is growing more cold and more evil and more lost every day and rather than join together in our conviction and worship of Christ we tear ourselves apart.

We are all poor miserable sinners without the ability to fight Satan or save ourselves. We should all pray every day for grace, patience, and forgiveness from God. None of us is worse than anyone else because we are all of us broken and unclean.

Was he still a Catholic Monk at the time?

Replying to the OP here to back up from the quibbling.

A couple preliminary things:
1. I confess that I get just as fired up about this stuff as the people who hold beliefs about Roman Catholicism that are the opposite of mine.

I have a hard time avoiding the reviling and scoffing, and I forget to speak in love (whether you believe it's the Truth or not).

I get into tigerdroppings mode (even though I'm not anonymous on here), and enjoy too much the typical online scrapping. This is too serious a topic to resort to that stuff.

2. The arguments I make on here are not pulled from some website or merely AI-generated. They are the product of my own study, and "fear and trembling."

3. I grew up with RC family in our house, I've attended Mass, I have studied early church history and patristics for the past 35 years, including from RC professors I adore (including preeminent Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa scholars) at the graduate level. I provide this bona fides only to try to demonstrate that i'm not some anti-Roman Catholic hack (whether you believe that or not). I actually study in a search for the truth. Patristics is one of my favorite topics.

4. That said, here's a summary I have been working on regarding transubstantiation (I can do apostolic succession and the priesthood next).

I do believe the Lord's Supper is more than a mere empty symbol. And, as I mentioned, Luther and other Protestants and EO believe in literal transubstantiation. I am not Lutheran or EO.

Ultimately, there is mystery in the sacraments. They are a key aspect of the Church (both visible and otherwise).

However, when people call the elements "literal flesh and blood" I believe they likely ("deep down") mean something less than literal.

I don't see anyone pumping stomachs and doing an easy lab test to prove their points (although I realize someone will say that has happened or that the elements revert back to bread and wine and are "deconsecrated" once removed from our bowels).

I also back up and ask, "Is eating Jesus really consistent with anything in the Bible?" If someone believes it is, then I'd love to hear the reasoning. Receiving the Holy Spirit, and God's Grace through the substitutionary atonement and sacrifice of Christ seems to me something way too substantial, eternal, mysterious, and divine to receive by eating a person's flesh. And then there's the bigger issue of having a priest conjure this consecration.

Those are just broad, general statements. With that said, here's my more reasoned and supported argument outline against transubstantiation. These are notes I've been keeping and refining in my own quest to understand more about the sacraments.

I like to start with the linguistic/etymological context:
Jesus likely spoke Aramaic at Passover table. In Passover liturgy the head of the meal says, “This is the bread of affliction our fathers ate in Egypt,” while holding present bread that obviously isn’t 15th-century-BC bread. The copula “is” in Hebrew/Aramaic can mark identification or signification.

Koine Greek mirrors this flexibility: estin (“is” – btw, I can’t do Greek alphabet on here so I transliterated) frequently carries a representational force: “The seven cows are seven years” (Gen 41:26), “the rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4), “this is the LORD’s Passover” (Ex 12:11 Septuagint or "LXX"). In such contexts, “is” = “signifies/stands for.” Also, we don’t think Jesus is a literal vine and we literal branches.

Applied to the Supper:
“Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.
(touto estin to soma mou … touto to poterion he kaine diatheke estin en to haimati mou) (Matt 26:26–28; Mark 14:22–24; Luke 22:19–20).
The parallel “the cup is the new covenant” presses the same point—no one thinks the cup actually becomes a covenant in its being; rather, it signifies it.

Paul, recounting the same tradition, continues to call it “bread” and “cup” after consecration (1 Cor 11:26–28; cf. 10:16–17). If the substances had ceased to be bread/wine, Scripture’s consistent usage of “bread/cup” would be odd.

The demonstrative touto (“this”) in the narratives picks out what Jesus is holding—bread and cup—not parts of His natural body and blood. The predicate (“my body … my blood”) gives the meaning of the elements for the covenant meal.

Context: The Supper is instituted in a Passover setting (Matt 26:17–30). Passover is rich in acted symbols (unleavened bread, bitter herbs, cups) that represent God’s saving work. Saying “this is the bread of affliction” or “this is the LORD’s Passover” uses performative symbolism. The disciples and every first-century Jew knew this.

“Blood of the covenant” (Matt 26:28; Mark 14:24) intentionally echoes Ex 24:8. There the blood signifies covenant ratification. Jesus declares His impending death as the true ratification to which the cup points.

When Jesus says “This is my body,” He is bodily present, unbroken, at the table. HE IS THERE. The literal body is literally there.
The most natural reading therefore is proleptic (forward-looking symbolism): the bread signifies the body “given for you” tomorrow (Luke 22:19), not a present, localized re-substance of His body in many places.

Minor point I could possibly quibble with if it weren’t for the overwhelming weight of the other points: Scripture prohibits drinking blood (Lev 17:10–14; Acts 15:20). The Supper’s language would be uniquely jarring (and not in a “Jesus jarred people often” sort of way!) if it mandated drinking literal blood. The symbolic-sacramental reading honors both the imagery and the moral law’s trajectory.

John 6 climaxes with “the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life; the flesh profits nothing” (John 6:63). Within John’s idiom, to “eat” the Son is to believe in Him (6:35, “he who comes/believes shall never hunger/thirst”). The chapter precedes the Supper and explains saving union by faith, not a rite changing substance.

Where John does describe the Supper language (John 13), he stresses humble service and cleansing fellowship, not a metaphysical change of elements.

“Do this for my remembrance” (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24–25). In the LXX, anamnesis (the name of an excellent and mostly unrelated book by LSU’s own Eric Voegelin btw) is a covenant “memorial” that brings God’s saving act to mind (e.g., Num 10:10) and, in Hebrews, contrasts with Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice (Heb 10:3, 10–14). The Supper proclaims that finished work (1 Cor 11:26); it does not repeat or re-offer it.

Christ “offered Himself once for all” and “by a single offering … perfected” (Heb 7:27; 9:12; 10:10–14). A rite understood as a propitiatory RE-presentation of the same sacrifice on many altars strains the “once” finality. The Supper proclaims that sacrifice’s benefits; it doesn’t renew it.

Paul’s warning to “discern the body” (1 Cor 11:29) appears in a section about failing to love the church body (11:17–34; cf. 10:17 “one bread … one body”). The most immediate failure in Corinth is despising fellow believers at the meal, not mis-identifying a changed substance.

Synecdoche/metaphor: Scripture freely uses concrete metaphors in covenant signs (ark, rock, lamb, blood). The Supper fits this sacramental pattern.

James 2:24 – "You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone."

James 2:26 – "For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so faith apart from works is dead."

Galatians 5:6 – "For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love."

1 Corinthians 13:2 – "If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing."

John 14:15 – "If you love me, you will keep my commandments."

Matthew 19:16-17 – "If you would enter life, keep the commandments."

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Upperdecker

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I upvoted both Bayou and yourself

#highchurchprot

So your position is that Christ wasn't enough?

And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness. – Romans 4:5

He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. – Titus 3:5

Yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified. – Galatians 2:16

Not a result of works, so that no one may boast. – Ephesians 2:9

But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace. – Romans 11:6

Who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began. – 2 Timothy 1:9

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Thankful for the efforts of Martin Luther.

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Many more people have been dragged down to Hell because of him. Congrats. This is a very strange flex.

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The international conspiracy to cover it up that rose to the highest level of the organization seems rather unique.

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It's the only church where it could happen because none of the other 753 derivative versions of it ever got big enough to have a comparatively large scandal. I'll give them that.

Martin Luther's Works and Writings about the Catholic Church

For my Protestant friends. Perhaps you should read these writings by Luther on the tenants and doctrines of the Catholic Church.

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Is that how you interpret it?

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Well it isn't an interpretation, it is the basis for original sin - man believing that he can be like God. By saying you control your fate is you saying you can be like God.

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Even Protestants believe in works

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There is nothing to believe or disbelieve about works, works are evidence of faith. However, evil people will do good deed and "good people" do bad things. Good people is in quotes because literally everyone believes they are good, but no one lives up to the glory of God. For that - thank goodness it is faith and not works.

No one said you are Satanic, we are brothers in Christ despite our differences.