Audio only:
Joe’s second and final response to the series Dr. William Lane Craig published responding to Gavin Ortlund’s thoughts on the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Here, Joe examines the citations Craig gives where the Early Church was NOT united on Eucharistic theology, and shows how they actually work against Craig’s case.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. This is part two of a two-part series responding to William Lane. Craig’s arguments against the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. So if you haven’t seen part one yet, you can check that out in the link in the description, but last week I was looking at his biblical case against the Eucharist. Today I’m looking at his case against the Eucharist on the basis of church history. Now, as many of you may know, Dr. William Lane Craig has been something of a personal hero to me as a wonderful apologist in defense of Christianity. But unfortunately on topics like the Eucharist, I think he’s just woefully misinformed now, part of his objection to the Eucharist involves philosophical arguments against transubstantiation. As he understands it, he’s pretty upfront about the fact that he just finds this whole teaching pretty weird.
CLIP:
This is an incredibly, incredibly complex and reticulate doctrine that has been well thought through by people like Thomas Aquinas, but I think is truly bizarre.
Joe:
Rather than diving deep into the philosophical aspects of transubstantiation, I thought it might be worth just pointing a few things out at the outset. First, both Catholics and Protestants are going to agree the God of the universe entered history as a baby boy born of a virgin, a male whose only biological parent is a female, and this God man announces to the world in stark terms that we are meant to eat his flesh and drink his blood, whatever that means. I think it’s fair to say that the whole thing is truly bizarre in the sense of being rather unusual and unexpected, and that’s true. However you make sense of the biblical data and whatever you might say of the Catholic view, the fact that 2000 years of brilliant theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Holy Saints have held to it should at least encourage a hint of intellectual humility and curiosity.
Is it possible that they see something that you don’t? So bearing that in mind, I would suggest that the boldest arguments that Craig makes are actually a series of radical, and I’m going to say unsupportable claims he makes about the Eucharist in church history. Now, if you’re looking for something that is supportable, take a stroll over to shameless joe.com and consider supporting the channel. For as little as $5 a month, you get access to exclusive live streams and a community of like-minded Christians who want to go deeper in their faith. Now, your direct support goes a long way towards keeping this ministry going. And so from the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who is a supporter, shameless joe.com, and hopefully we’ll see you there as well. So, okay, when I say that Dr. Craig’s view of church history is radical, here’s what I mean. Listen to his reply to Dr. Gavin Orland on how the early Christians understood the real presence.
CLIP:
Now, some people say that real presence is the universal view throughout church history. I think that’s slightly overstated, but it is nearly unanimous. Gavin acknowledges that there are nuances and debates among church leaders throughout history, but he maintains that some species of real presence has been the dominant view. Bill.
I think this is very misleading, Kevin, if not downright false. Of course, real presence became the dominant view after the Roman Catholic Church condemned people like Hon Guard in the 11th century for holding to a symbolic view.
Joe:
I actually had to listen to that claim twice just to make sure I wasn’t mishearing what Craig is claiming. He doesn’t just say that he’s found a minority view, that there were some people along the way who didn’t think Christ was really present in the Eucharist. He literally claims that belief in the real presence wasn’t even the dominant view until after the condemnation of Behring gar in the 11th century. So just compare Craig’s assertion here with the writings of church historians like the Protestant j and d Kelly who says of the church in the fourth and fifth century that Eucharistic teaching it should be understood at the outset was in general unquestioningly realist, IE. The consecrated bread and wine were taken to be and were treated and designated as the savior’s body and blood. And as we’re going to see this isn’t just true of Christians in the fourth and fifth century, this is also true of the Christians of the first and second and third century as well. Well, how does Craig buttress his quite radical view that real presence wasn’t the dominant view until the 11th century? He cites to a couple of scholars that I don’t think say what he says they do First, he cites to the work of the Jesuit scholar Father Gary Macy
CLIP:
Among the church fathers. There was a diversity of opinion about the real presence, the historical theologian, Gary Macy in his book, theologies of the Eucharist, calls the Patristic period, the origins of diversity, and then he characterizes the period to follow the decline of diversity.
Joe:
But Macy’s book isn’t on the early church. It’s on the period of 10 80 to 1220 as the title says. And now it’s true. He does in passing address the early church, but he does so only in a pretty cursory fashion. And even there, I don’t think it lines up with Craig’s description. For instance, he claims that the Christians in the East focused on the reality and power of the Lord’s presence and on adoration in the liturgy, which already doesn’t sound like they didn’t believe in the real presence. Then he says that in the West, people like St. Augustine while not denying the reality of the presence of the Lord and the ritual preferred to stress the community itself as the true body of Christ. Whatever you think of that argument, you should notice that he’s explicitly presenting this as a difference in emphasis or stress, not an actual contradiction.
There’s no contradiction between saying the Eucharist is the body of Christ and the church is the body of Christ. And Macy seems to go out of his way to make it clear that he’s not arguing that there is any kind of contradiction, or at least there’s no contradiction that they know about as he puts it, whatever incompatibilities may have existed in these different emphases by the fathers and their discussions of the Eucharist seem to have gone unnoticed during their lifetimes. So if there was some kind of implicit contradiction, it was one that alluded the early Christians. They didn’t think they were teaching different theologies. One saying, I believe in the real presence and another saying they didn’t. They seemed to have thought their views were harmonious. It was simply a difference in emphasis. So what Macy appears to be arguing for in the book seems to me to be quite different from what Craig is claiming Macy argues.
Now, I would actually suggest just more broadly that this is a good guide for how to read, or importantly how not to read the church Fathers at times they’re going to openly disagree with one another on a doctrine they’re not afraid to do. So that happens. But if you’re looking at an issue in which they don’t do that, where they don’t openly disagree, in which they aren’t arguing against each other and they’re just talking about different aspects of the same doctrine, you should read that with what’s called the hermeneutic of continuity. Assume unless there’s good evidence to the contrary that they agree with one another and are just describing different aspects of a broad topic. Somebody saying that Trinity is one essence and somebody else saying there are three persons in the Trinity. They’re not fighting, they’re just talking about different things. And unfortunately, I frequently find Protestant apologists and theologians who kind of mine the church fathers looking for support for their own theology, and they’re going to find some places where the teaching is just completely contradicted by the early Christians and other places where, okay, they say something that could kind of make sense with either a Catholic or a Protestant worldview.
So if you find someone saying that there are all these different contradictory theologies on something important like baptism or the Eucharist, it’s worth asking, well, where do we see the fathers fighting with one another on these questions? Because if you have to invent a fight that isn’t there, that might be a sign that you’re misreading them because you’re not using a hermeneutic of continuity. So again, I don’t think Craig is purposely misrepresenting the work of Macy, but I don’t think he’s representing his view or the views of the early Christians very well, and I think that actually pales in comparison to how badly he misunderstands the argument of Yaroslav pelican. Now, if you’re not familiar, Pelican was a brilliant historian Yale, and he was a Lutheran pastor who at the age of 75 converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. So already his biography alone should probably signal that Pelican was someone who believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But here’s how Craig claims Pelican describes church history.
CLIP:
The great dogmatic historian Yaroslav Pelican has said that no one during this early era clearly affirmed that the presence of the body and blood was purely symbolic. Although he says Tu and Oregon came close, and no one clearly affirmed the real presence of the body and blood, though Iran as an Ambrose came close,
Joe:
This simply is not true. Pelican says the exact opposite of what Craig claims he’s saying in the very book that Craig is citing. Pelican describes that for the Christians of the one hundreds and the two hundreds, the worshiping congregation believed Christ himself to be present among them. He describes how the adoration of Christ in the Eucharist through the words and actions of the liturgy seemed to have presupposed that this was a special presence, a presence which some early Christian writers expressed in strikingly realistic language. For instance, he points to the passage and went Saint Ignatius writing about 1 0 7 describes the Eucharist as the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins. Now, pelicans going to sum all of this up by saying that during this time period, the theologians did not have adequate concepts within which to formulate a doctrine of the real presence that evidently was already believed by the church, even though it was not yet taught by explicit instruction or confessed by creeds.
In other words, Pelican is explicitly arguing and on the basis of a wealth of evidence, by the way that the earliest Christians clearly believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but they didn’t have a good theological vocabulary yet to explain things like the particularities of his mode of presence or how transubstantiation works or anything like that. In Pelican’s words, this doctrine of the real presence was believed by the church and affirmed by its liturgy. That is, we don’t just have to compare the writings of individual Christian theologians and guess how representative each of their views are. We can literally look to the liturgical text of how the Christians prayed together and we can see that they were worshiping Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Now compare Pelican’s words in which he says that the real presence was believed in by the church and affirmed by his liturgy with Craig’s claim that pelican taught that no one
CLIP:
Clearly affirmed the real presence of the body and blood. Though I a as an Ambrose came close,
Joe:
I actually found the precise passage that Craig seems to be misremembering, and I do think this is a case of misremembering rather than something worse because Craig actually makes several different mistakes in trying to recount what Pelican said. For instance, he mixes up Clement and Tertullian and he mixes up IUs and Ignatius. But misremembering aside, I just don’t understand how Craig could have read this chapter or this book and come away with the idea that Pelican thought Christians in the second and third century didn’t believe in the real presence, yet worse, I don’t know how someone as smart as Craig could read Pelican who offers numerous quotations showing that the Christians of the second and third century collectively believed in the real presence of Christ and worshiped accordingly, and then continue to claim that belief in the real presence wasn’t a dominant view in the church until a thousand years later. That’s an enormous and frankly, indefensible misreading of church history. Now in opposition to the theology of the early Christians, Craig’s going to appeal instead to Dr. Stephen NIUs. Now, NIMS is a former Protestant who now rejects the Trinity.
CLIP:
Stephen Neish, a Christian philosopher in his book, eating The Flesh of Christ, has characterized these various doctrines of the real presence as magical cannibalism. And I think that is not unfair, and it is such a far cry from what I think we find taught in the New Testament, and therefore I do not think this is a doctrine that we should affirm.
Joe:
I don’t find this kind of argumentation very helpful. It just seems like a personal attack on the early Christians of just calling their view magical cannibalism. But even on the charge of cannibalism, Craig is actually once again showing well how poorly he understands the Catholic theology of transubstantiation on the one hand, because unlike cannibalism, the Eucharist doesn’t involve destroying the flesh of Christ. But on the other hand, and I think more importantly, we know as a matter of history that the earliest enemies of Christianity likewise accused them of being cannibals. Theophilus denies this accusation in the letter from 180 1. There’s a section in Octavius MIUs is Felix, in which a pagan claims that the Christian liturgy involves covering a baby with grain so they can eat his flesh and drink his blood under the appearance of bread. Now, of course, all of those are kind of caricatures of the mass, but that’s the point.
If your theology of the Eucharist couldn’t be mistaken for cannibalism, then it isn’t what the early Christians believed because clearly theirs could be mistaken for cannibalism because it was. Now, it’s not just that the earliest Christians believed Christ was present in the Eucharist. As pelican shows this doctrine of the real presence believed by the church and affirmed by its liturgy was closely tied to the idea of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. Now, he quotes Saint Cian who describes of Jesus Christ, our high priest offered himself as a sacrifice to the Father and has commanded his priests here on earth to offer that same sacrifice. And this is hardly new to Cian in the New Testament itself. Jesus’s description of Christian worship seems to take for granted that we’re going to have altars in Hebrews 13, likewise speaks of us eating the sacrifice from the altar.
Now, as we saw in my earlier response to Craig, St. Paul compares the Eucharistic sacrifice to the sacrifices offered at Jewish and Pagan altars. And as I point out in my book, the early church was the Catholic Church. We can find references to the Eucharist being a sacrifice going back to the earliest Christian writings outside of the New Testament. For example, the Diday, which might date back as early as the first century explicitly describes Christian liturgy as a sacrifice. So too Justin martyr writing about one 50 argues that the Eucharistic sacrifice is a fulfillment of the prophecy of Malachi One. So does Seu, who describes the Eucharist as a sacrifice in spirit and truth. And again, these are not just individual theologians or bishops offering fringe opinions. As Pelican points out, liturgical evidence suggests an understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, a sacrifice prefigured by the Old Testament sacrifices, and in fact a represenation of the sacrifice on Calvary to the Father. Now, if that sounds like I’m saying, the first 300 years of Christians were Catholic in their worship and that pelican saying the same thing, well listen to what Craig would say to Christians who hold such a view.
CLIP:
The idea that the Eucharist is a represenation of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross to God is a Catholic doctrine that was vehemently opposed by the Protestant reformers. There was no aspect of the Catholic mass that they rejected more vigorously than the idea that the mass was a sacrifice presented to God. And therefore, I think it is all together unfitting to regard the Eucharist as a sacrifice that we offer to God.
Joe:
Now, I actually largely agree with Craig on this point. The reformers did reject the kind of Christian worship that was offered by the Christians who knew the Apostles. But that doesn’t seem to me to be a reason to reject early Christianity. That seems to me to be a reason to reject the Protestant reformation. And remember, this is not a case where the experts that Craig is citing or disagreeing with the experts that I’m citing, and you got to sift through the evidence rather, the experts that Craig is citing disagree with William Lynn Craig, they say the opposite. There’s simply too much evidence to deny that the earliest Christians worship Jesus Christ in the Eucharist and sacrificially represented him to the Father. In fact, the earliest Christians were willing to endure literal martyrdom for the sake of the Eucharist, as we can see from cases like the martyrdom of St. SIUs, for example. In fact, you can check that case out and learn more of what the earliest Christians had to say about the Eucharist by going right here. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.