Hi, I'm David Bercot. And I want to thank all of you who submitted questions during this past month. Unfortunately, we're not going to be able to answer all the questions during this session, but I'm going to try to answer as many as possible. And then down the road, we can hopefully answer the other ones. I'm going to be answering the questions essentially in chronological order based on when they were submitted to us. Now, a few of the questions I'm going to have to skip because they were too long.
And so if I can make a suggestion when you send in questions, reduce your questions to a few sentences if you possibly can. Now, it's okay to send a longer explanation to help me understand what you're after. But then if you can reduce it to a few sentences, I'm more apt to answer it here on the podcast because if the question itself is too long or too complicated, you know our listeners are going to have a hard time following the question.
In fact, some of the questions, I had a hard time following myself exactly what the person was looking for. Okay. So with those few comments, let's get started. The first question I'm going to address concerns John 6, where Jesus said," Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you." And the question was submitted in this form. The person said," I've talked to a traditional Roman Catholic young man about the sacraments and the Eucharist," which is communion.
He referred to the speech of the bread of life. This is the latter part of John 6, if I'm not mistaken. How did the early Christians understand Jesus when he says," Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you." All right. So very good question. I'm not sure if we've discussed it recently. I know I've discussed it in the past. So there are four main passages in the New Testament that talk about communion or the Eucharist, as the early Christians called it.
Eucharist is simply from the Greek word meaning thanksgiving. All right. So the four passages, there's John 6 to which you referred in your question. Then there's Matthew 26 verses 26 through 28. And let me read those to you.
They say," As they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said,' Take, eat, this is my body.'" Then he took the cup and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying," Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Okay, so that's the second one. All right, now we're going to jump ahead to 1 Corinthians. There's two passages there where Paul talks about communion.
The first one is 1 Corinthians 10:16 where he simply says," The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break? Is it not the communion of the body of Christ?" Again, that's 1 Corinthians 10:16. Okay. Then finally, there's 1 Corinthians 11:23 through 27. And this one is the one that's most familiar to Protestants. And it says," The Lord Jesus, on the same night in which He was betrayed, took bread.
And when He had given thanks, He broke it and said,' Take, eat. This is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me." And then Paul continues," In the same manner, he also took the cup after supper, saying," This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes.
Therefore, whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. Now, the early Christians understood all four of these passages to be referring to communion, and they took them all at face value. I mean, that is, they quote them just as they are without trying to explain them away. In fact, they don't try to explain them at all. They just quote them. They simply believed what the Scripture said.
In contrast, on the one hand, most Protestant churches focus almost solely on that fourth passage that we read from 1 Corinthians 11. And they say that communion is only a remembrance of Christ's death and something we do to proclaim His death. And then they largely explained away those first three passages that we read. Then on the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church has attempted to attach a fixed definition to Jesus' words.
And this is through the doctrine of transubstantiation, as the Roman Catholic Church calls it. Now, the Catholic Church defines transubstantiation in these words. This is right out of their catechism. It says," By the consecration of the bread and wine, there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ, our Lord, and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of His blood.
This change the Holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation. Now, in contrast, the early Christians didn't try to define it so precisely. When they talk about it, they simply repeat Jesus' words when they talk about it. They usually say they believe it to be His flesh and to be His blood. Does this mean they believed it to be His physical flesh and blood? Or did they believe it to be His supernatural spiritual flesh and blood? I don't know. They don't normally say.
They just repeat his words. And so if we're wise, I think we should believe it where the Scripture speaks and leave it alone where Scripture doesn't speak. So I'm comfortable quoting Jesus' words, but I don't try to add anything to them to explain them. He said what he said, and I believe it, but I don't pretend to understand it. Now, the one thing the Catholic Church has added that you do not find in Scripture or in the early church, and that is the practice of literally worshiping the consecrated bread and wine.
And the Catholic catechism I quoted from before, it says this," In the liturgy of the Mass, we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine by genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord." The Catholic Church has always offered and still offers to the sacrament of the Eucharist the cult of adoration. Now, in Catholic terminology, adoration means the worship that we give to God Himself. That's adoration. It's beyond veneration.
And it was this practice of adoration, of actually worshipping the consecrated bread and wine that caused the Anabaptists and most Protestants to just totally reject the Catholic mass. Now, unfortunately, many, if not most, Protestants swung to the opposite extreme, and they explained away Jesus' words about communion, just making communion nothing more than symbolic. And I don't think we should do that.
I think we can hold to a middle ground where we respect that something beyond the material realm happens in communion. But exactly in what manner we commune with the body and blood of Christ to use Paul's words, I don't think we have to explain or even try to explain. I think we can just enjoy the mystery that this is what the Scriptures say and something very special is happening here.
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