Tantum Ergo
April 8, 2011 Leave a comment
“When Christians say the Christ-life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being “in Christ” or of Christ being “in them” this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying Him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them: that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts –that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by the bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion…There is no good in trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.” C. S. Lewis
I will never understand why the Bible/Baptist churches teach that the communion wafer and grape juice are just symbols or tokens of Christ’s sacrifice and not the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. It is these same churches that preach that Christ dwells within the believer. Why cannot that same Christ dwell in the bread and wine?
The Holy Spirit came down as a dove. And, God moved His people with a cloud and pillar of fire. Manna. The burning bush. The Temple. These all were obviously physical manifestations that required the eyes of faith to rightly see that God was in them. The same applies to the bread and wine.
“But Jesus didn’t give an inch. “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you. The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life and will be fit and ready for the Final Day. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you. In the same way that the fully alive Father sent me here and I live because of him, so the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. This is the Bread from heaven. Your ancestors ate bread and later died. Whoever eats this Bread will live always.””
“Well, if [the Eucharist] is just a symbol, to hell with it.”–Flannery O’Connor, when discussing Catholicism with writer Mary McCarthy
(Flannery) “O’Connor was often critical of what she considered Protestant shortcomings. “A Protestant habit is to condemn the Church for being authoritarian and then blame her for not being authoritarian enough”. She had a healthy respect for fundamentalist Protestants, and she was alarmed at the liberal theology she heard coming from some Protestant camps. “One of the effects of modern liberal Protestantism has been gradually to turn religion into poetry and therapy, to make truth vaguer and vaguer and more and more relative, to banish intellectual distinctions, to depend on feeling instead of thought, and gradually to come to believe that God has no power, that he cannot communicate with us, cannot reveal himself to us, indeed has not done so and that religion is our own sweet invention”. She understood the difference between cheap grace and costly grace. “What people don’t realize,” she wrote to Louise Abbot, “is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross”.”From this web page.
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Cindy Wity 