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In this episode Trent sits down with Protestant Youtuber Bryce Crawford and explain the Church’s teaching on the Eucharist.
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Transcript:
Bryce Crawford (00:00):
I’m not going to lie, that’s the best explanation I’ve heard of the Catholic perspective of the Eucharist.
Trent Horn (00:07):
I’m nudging you along the spectrum till I can get you to the Catholic view. Recently I spoke with Protestant YouTuber Bryce Crawford about Catholicism, and in today’s episode, I’ll share with you our discussion about the Eucharist. And if you want to watch the whole episode, click the link in the description below. And now my discussion on the Eucharist with Bryce Crawford.
Bryce Crawford (00:26):
Let’s go to the Eucharist conversation, because I think this is very fascinating to me. And the reason that it intrigues me is because I grew up Southern Baptist. So I grew up a communion as a symbol and something that I appreciate is God’s grace on me for viewing it merely as a symbol. And I did approach it willy-nilly many times, granted for the sake of I just thought it was a symbol. Here it is, take communion once a month, big holidays. That’s it, right? As I’ve begun to read, I’m going, I don’t think it’s just a symbol. But where I land on the Eucharist theology line is I don’t believe it’s just a symbol, but I have not been fully convinced of transsubstantiation, which for those listening is the idea that the bread is the literal flesh, the wine is the blood.
Trent Horn (01:21):
We can always work with where you’re at. I find a lot of times when people sort through a lot of these issues, I will be honest, in recent years, there’s a little bit of a pipeline. People will often start sort of maybe low church Baptists like yourself. Well, actually there was an academic recently, Matthew Barrett. He was a Baptist scholar. He wrote a defensive solo scriptura. And then later on though, he’s radically changed his theology and is now Anglican and people question, is he going to go Catholic? He’s really tiptoe in that area. Well, a friend of mine, Steven Boyce, he has a YouTube channel, Facts, F-A-C-T-S. And two years ago, Steven and I took part in a public debate on justification by faith alone. It was a two-on-two debate. He was partnered with another Protestant and myself and my colleague, Jimmy Aiken. So we did a two-on-two debate on justification by faith alone.
(02:18):
Steven admitted at the time, even prior to that, he was a Baptist. He had been on James White’s channel, but he felt like, look, the Baptist theology, Eucharist being a symbol, baptism is something that you just show as a symbol of your renewal. Credo baptism, he’s like, “Can’t find this in the early church. Can’t find it. ” So he then moves towards Anglicanism. Then we debate and he’s still sorting through Anglicanism, but ultimately the Catholic church’s universal claims in relation to the fracturing and Anglicanism, the historical problems, he’s now come into the Catholic church. And so I think sometimes there’s like, well, the low church, I want to go to a higher church, but still many of the problems I thought wouldn’t persist are kind of still there. And then people sort of move over as a result. So I think that a lot of people when this is debated like the Eucharist, actually there is a gulf between just a symbol and transsubstantiation to say that Jesus, the bread and wine is the body and blood of Christ.
(03:20):
So I guess I put it this way. There’s a symbol and that’s like the Zwing. And actually the Protestant reformers, they couldn’t agree on this. They had huge fights about this because Ulrich Zwingli was a Swiss reformer who said it’s a symbol. And Calvin zoo is more, no, it’s not a symbol. Christ is present to believers. So like if you receive the Eucharist as a believer, you’re receiving Christ. So the bread and wine communicate Jesus. Lutherans following Martin Luther would say, “Well, no, it is the bread and wine are Jesus not just for unbelievers, but also not just for believers, but if an unbeliever received it, they’d also be receiving Jesus.” And in one Corinthians chapter 11, Paul says, “If you eat and drink of the Eucharist in an unworthy way, you eat and drink judgment on yourself. Why some of you are dying even?” And that would make sense if the Lutheran view is saying, “Well,
(04:11):
No.” So it’s a symbol of Jesus. Jesus is communicated through the bread and wine. The Lutheran view is called sacramental union. I think the reformed call it consubstantiation, but Lutherans are like, “We never called it that dude. Come on. ” Because the reform we’re trying to say, “You guys are basically like Catholics. They’re trans substantiation. Lutherans are just con substantiation.” And they’re like, “Dude, come on. We didn’t know. ” The Lutherans would say the bread and wine contain Jesus. They contain him. And so it affects even the forgiveness of sins. Where Lutherans would stop short is Catholics and Orthodox would say, “The bread and wine is Jesus, that what we call bread and wine no longer remain.” And so the word transsubstantiation, it’s a medieval scholastic term to describe this change that what appears there are the appearances, but the substance has changed. And so in the early church, like the Eastern, the Greek fathers, I think it was Gregory of Nissa, he used the term metastoicaosis.
(05:12):
It literally means trans elementation. So that’s where we have to get into substance and accidents. So to make a very rough analogy, you can’t press too literally. We could get makeup artists and wardrobe people and plastic surgeons and they could dye your hair and give you the curly cues, contacts, all the other stuff make you look like me, and they could make me look hip and cool like you with the more carefree hair, put some tattoos on me. I’d prefer Hannah, got to get off eventually, too old to be rock and all that stuff. They could make you look like me and me look like you, but inside, you’re still going to be you and I’m still going to be me. There’s just an analogy, don’t press it too deeply. So man can change the outside, but not the inside. God can change the inside without the outside.
(06:03):
So God could do like Freaky Friday where it’s like I’m in your body and you’re in my body. It’s an analogy for the philosophers out there to conceptualize. So it’s like God could do that. Man can only change the outside, not the metaphysical inside, but God can change the metaphysical inside while leaving the outside. Now for human beings, in order to … We can change the metaphysical inside. We usually have to destroy the outside. So like your soul being in your body, right? That’s a metaphysical thing about you. But if somebody cut off your head, they’ll change that fact about you real quick
Bryce Crawford (06:32):
Because
Trent Horn (06:32):
Your soul will leave your body
Bryce Crawford (06:33):
There.
Trent Horn (06:34):
But they have to change the outside to do that to change the inside. God can change the inside without changing the outside. He can change the substance, not the accidents. So to give another example of like substance, what the heck does that mean? Okay. So you said you were born, what, 24 years ago?
Bryce Crawford (06:51):
22, 2003.
Trent Horn (06:52):
Okay. So you’re born 22 years ago and you, not just for the same baby that was born, you’re like, you were the same embryo that was in your mother’s body. But the thing is though, you’re the same, but there’s nothing physically about you that’s the same. You have different cells. Even from being a baby, they’re all basically different. Even if you only have like 5% of the same cells, you have a totally new body. If I change my car and only 5% of the old parts are there, it’s a brand new car,
(07:20):
But people are different. So it’s like, oh wait. Yeah, we’ve got this material, the accidents. There’s things that can change about us that we don’t change. I could grow my hair out. I could do the looks maxing leg lengthening thing, which guys don’t. Girls really don’t stop jamming hammers in your face and lengthening your legs. Just be funny and confident and not a weirdo and girls will like you. Sorry, we’ll do the whole look next episode. I like it. Yeah, totally. Well, you could change that. You could make me like six feet tall and I’d still be me. I would just be really regretting that when I’m 60 probably, but I’d still be me. You can change accidents, but there’s something that’s substantial. It’s the metaphysical core that unites all of it together, that that is something that even that I had as an embryo that still persists into me.
(08:06):
And that would be part of my immaterial soul that God gave me. So Catholics believe that, look, God wants us to receive the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ. He wants us to receive him as the Passover lamb,
(08:17):
But not like cannibals do with actual flesh and blood. So it’s very fitting under the signs of bread and wine and there’s sacramental significance that when the priest prays over them, the bread and wine, the appearances remain, but God can change that substance, the metaphysical inside, the core that humans can’t touch, but God can change. And through a miracle, he keeps all the accidents united. Our souls are what keep all of our bodily accidents together. Because think about when you die, right? We say a body decomposes. Well, our soul is what makes us compose. It keeps all our parts together, otherwise it starts to fall apart and decompose.
(08:56):
So in God, changing the normal substance of bread and wine, what keeps all the accidents together through a miracle that is the body and blood of Christ uniting what appears to be bread and wine, that the appearances remain, what we see, touch, taste, here, and smell. But what we are actually receiving, we would say, no, we’re not just saying that bread and wine are containing Jesus. We say, we are receiving the body, blood, swollen divinity of Jesus Christ. And the early Christians, like what I said about baptism, they’re very clear about this. Ignatius of Antioch in the year 107 along with saying, obey the bishop as Jesus Christ obeys the Father, which is that’s wild. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of Protestant say something like that. He said that heretics abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that it is the flesh and blood of our savior, Jesus Christ.
(09:43):
And they say, “It’s not that, so I’m not going to receive that. ” But receiving it to say, or Justin Martyr in the year 165, he’s saying, “Not as ordinary bread and wine do we receive these things, but as the body and blood of that Jesus Christ who was crucified.” So if you have that understanding of the sacramental worldview, a good book, if your listeners want to go deeper on that, is called Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist by Brant Petrie that what can be hard for us to understand, a lot of times you’ll understand the Catholic faith if when you start to understand Judaism really well and you see, oh, I brought Jewish people to mass and they’ll say, “This is just like temple sort of. ” And I’m like, “Yeah, it’s the fulfillment. It’s the fulfillment of Jewish worship found in the true Messiah, Jesus Christ.”
Bryce Crawford (10:30):
Wow.
Trent Horn (10:31):
And so you see that under the Eucharist, all what Jesus says about the bread of life, about the man that come down from heaven, it can be very difficult to understand that without understanding the endurance of the Passover, the mana manhoo in Hebrew and the Old Testament, that seeing all these Jewish roots, that’s something that’s attracted to me. And a lot of other Jews convert to Catholicism because they see that, oh wow, if Jesus is the Messiah, what God gave us in the old covenant, it’s not just done away with, it’s found its fulfillment. Jesus said, “I’ve come not to abolish the law on the prophets, but to fulfill them.”
Bryce Crawford (11:03):
I’m not going to lie, that’s the best explanation I’ve heard of the Catholic perspective of the Eucharist. It makes me think. It makes me think a lot. I land in the real presence category right now where I believe that the presence of the Lord is there when partaking in communion. And when I began to kind of have that perspective and get this reverence back, actually one of my Protestant pastor friends came back from attending a Catholic mass in New York and was like, “I think we have lost a reverence for community and I just happened to be with him in Alabama.”
Trent Horn (11:38):
Let me ask you a question. Do you think Jesus, his real presence in the Eucharist is different than the presence of when two or three are gathered in his name?
Bryce Crawford (11:48):
In a way, yes, I do. And I think, yes, I do.
Trent Horn (11:53):
I’m nudging you along the spectrum to get you to the Catholic view. But what I’m saying here is, if it is, then the question you’ll have to sort out for yourself is, well, I guess I’d say this, let’s say you brought a non-believer to your church. He’s just like, “I want to check out church. I’m not sure exactly what this is. I’m going to come check it out.
Bryce Crawford (12:11):
I don’t
Trent Horn (12:12):
Believe in Jesus yet, but I want to see.” You be like, “Cool, man, come.” You could just hang out and you don’t have to do anything, just check it out. Okay. And people go up to receive the Eucharist. Would it be okay for him to go receive the Eucharist?
Bryce Crawford (12:23):
I personally believe in close communion.
Trent Horn (12:25):
Okay. Pushing you further. Yeah, you’re pushing me.
Bryce Crawford (12:29):
You’re pushing me.
Trent Horn (12:30):
Yeah. And the reason for that would be, oh, it’s because it’s like we would never say, “Oh, you can’t hear the Bible until you’re Christian.” It’s like, “Well, of course you can hear the Bible.” We’re hearing the words of Jesus that we’re receiving grace by … Obviously we give the word of scripture to a non-believer, but in the dedicate, what I mentioned earlier about baptism, it has instructions about the Eucharist and it says
(12:55):
It quotes Jesus. And remember, this is like honestly, it starts scholars who believe that dedicate is older than the gospel of Matthew because Matthew and the dedicate are parallel that either dedicate drew from Matthew or Matthew is actually paralleling things that are already found in the dedicate. And one of those is in the dedicate it says, “Do not give the Eucharist to those who are not baptized. For our Lord said, do not give that which is holy to dogs.” Going back to what he said in the Sermon on the Mount saying, “This is what Jesus means by that. ” The first century Christians would say, “What that means is the Eucharist is a very holy presence of Jesus that we share, so we cannot give that which is holy to those who have not been made holy through baptism already.” And so if you argue for a closed communion, that would push one more towards, oh, this is to say, no, Jesus, like the Eucharist, he’s really present here, even if you don’t believe that is him.
(13:47):
And so if you’re not prepared to receive, just the same as a Catholic who is in grave sin, cannot go and receive Jesus in the Eucharist because they eat and drink judgment on themselves. Receiving the Eucharist is a sign to say, “I am in communion with you Lord and with the church and I desire to receive you. Lord, come and enter under my roof,” as the Roman soldier said about Jesus.
Bryce Crawford (14:14):
When I say this, I’m not just landing like, “Yep, this is where I’m going to be for the rest of my life.” I enjoy the real presence perspective right now of communion because I feel like I have found this new profound reverence and respect for the Lord in it and not that it’s about experience, but my experience with communion and the presence of God is drastically different. And in fact, I’m at this place right now where Father Lazarus, my Coptic Orthodox friend, we were talking to the Eucharist and he’s like, “It’s my medicine. I can’t live without it. ” And when he said that, it just made me just begin to think of all the times prior to-
Trent Horn (14:53):
I’ll give you an example. So for those who are too sick to receive the Eucharist, we have a ministry where those priests will do this, but also lay people when there’s not enough priests to deliver the Eucharist to the home bound, they’re stuck in a hospital bed or something so they can receive … And this is what the early Christians use that language. They said, “This is the medicine of immortality.” Not that we earn eternal life by receiving the Eucharist, but we’re saying that just like, look, I’m alive because my parents gave birth to me and they raised me and gave me life. I didn’t earn it at all. If I choose to not eat the food, I’m going to die. The food isn’t earned my life, it’s just saying, I could choose to kill myself by going on a hunger strike, probably the worst way to go.
(15:38):
Well, Christians can do the same thing if they choose to not receive Jesus in the Eucharist. You don’t always have to receive every Sunday, you have to celebrate, but you could be in a state of grave sin where you’re not able to receive the Eucharist. You could live in a very poor area where a priest maybe comes once every few months. The church just gives as a law when you’re able to receive the Eucharist at least once a year, preferably during the Easter season. But ideally more than that, because Pope Francis has said, “Look, the Eucharist is not a prize for being holy.” He says, “It is the medicine of immortality. It is what heals us. It’s what gives us spiritual grace to be able to resist sin, resist temptation.” So I think there that you’re on a good and right track with that, but to see that this is important, why is it important?
(16:24):
And yeah, that medicine and immortality language is very, very early on in the church and how it’s used.
Bryce Crawford (16:31):
Yeah. I did like that phraseology and that language. It was very interesting to me. I like talking in honest conversation about this stuff because I am intrigued and Catholicism intrigues me and- Oh, I forgot
Trent Horn (16:47):
What I was going to say about the home bound. Sorry, I have three kids and they kept me up last night, but let’s say you believe you’re going to go give that Eucharist … Maybe in your own church say, I’m sure you’d love to do this. Hey, there’s someone, I want to receive the Eucharist. And you’re like, “Oh, you’re stuck at home. I’ll bring it to you. I’ll do that. ” There were saints in the early church. There was a story of a saint named Tarcissius. This was when the Roman Empire was still persecuting Christians and he was bringing the Eucharist to people in the catacombs, others who were in hiding, couldn’t go to mask, couldn’t receive it. And a mob descended on and asked him what he was doing and they tried to take the Eucharist from him and he miraculously held onto the Eucharist so hard they couldn’t pry it out of his hands even as they beat him to death.
(17:29):
He would not allow the Eucharist to fall into their hands. He did not want it to be. He wanted to protect it and to save it. And so that’s one of the reasons that he was the early Christians recognized that God had miraculously worked through him and now he had died as a witness to the faith, a witness to not just that Jesus died, but that Jesus died, rose and now is present in the Eucharist for any who would receive the medicine of immortality.
(17:53):
And so I think that that kind of a witness to me, look, there’s only two options to look at that. Either Saintarcyus was a faithful disciple of Jesus and loved Jesus and died for him or he was an idolater and he thought a piece of bread was God. So I think one has to eventually make the choice, not just at this bread and wine that it contained Jesus in a spiritual way, but the bread, it is, I am carrying the body of Christ with me right now. So to me, it’s like you look at that story, it’s like, look, he’s either a martyr for Christ or there may Protestants say, “That guy’s an idolater going to hell. He thinks bread is Jesus.” And I would encourage Protesans who would think through this question of the Eucharist. If they want to go deeper, I’ll shill another book.
(18:32):
My friend Joe Heschmire has a book called The Eucharist is Really Jesus. I’m going to mail you all this stuff, man. I’m going to mail you all this. I was going to bring one of my books. I brought another gift for you. I didn’t know if I was going to have time to give it to you or not. Be sure to ask about it, but I brought you. I’ll do it now.
Bryce Crawford (18:48):
Oh, I’m pumped.
Trent Horn (18:49):
I brought you. Brought you something.
Bryce Crawford (18:50):
Whoa, let’s go. I was
Trent Horn (18:51):
Going to bring you books, but I can mail books.
Bryce Crawford (18:53):
Wow.
Trent Horn (18:53):
That is a Jerusalem cross.
Bryce Crawford (18:55):
Wow.
Trent Horn (18:56):
So the Jerusalem cross was popular around the 10th and 11th century. And so it was on the flags of the Crusaders who are retaking Jerusalem. I bought that from Christians in Jerusalem when I was there in 2018. And I actually took that in several other crosses that I bought and prayed over them when I placed them on the tomb of Jesus.
Bryce Crawford (19:21):
Whoa. So this one was on Jesus. On the
Trent Horn (19:25):
Jesus’ tomb that is in the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
Bryce Crawford (19:28):
Oh man. This is a really kind give. Thank you. Yeah.
Trent Horn (19:31):
And so the symbolism, there’s different origins of the symbols. One says the five crosses are symbols of the five wounds of Christ, his hands, his feet, and his side. Another symbol is that the four smaller crosses are the gospels that are being spread to the four corners of the earth.
Bryce Crawford (19:49):
Very fascinating.
Trent Horn (19:50):
So yeah, that was the cross popular. The Franciscan Friars of the Holy Land carry that cross as their symbol. But yeah.
Bryce Crawford (19:57):
Dang. This is very cool. Thank you so much. I thought you would like that. This is sweet. I love it. This is … Wow. Thank you.
Trent Horn (20:02):
Have you ever been to Israel?
Bryce Crawford (20:04):
Not yet. I want to go. I really want to go.
Trent Horn (20:06):
I’ll tell you what, man, when things calm down there, when they calm down, I’ll take you. We’ll have a good time.
Bryce Crawford (20:12):
I would love to go. I really want to go. I want to see it. I want to see the Holy Land. I want to walk and I want to go. I just want to see it all.
Trent Horn (20:20):
Hey guys, thanks so much for watching. And once again, check out the full interview in the description below and don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and support us at trendhornpodcast.com. Thank you guys so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.