The case for transubstantiation still hasn't been made: empiricism vs. tradition

By Tim Dunkin

In his latest article in our ongoing discussion about the early churches and the place, if any, that transubstantiation found in early Christian theology, Eric Giunta has again failed to make the case for his position. Instead, he has committed a number of logical fallacies and other errors, while failing to substantively address the points I made previously. This is his prerogative, of course, but it does little to convince anyone who is not already in agreement with him as to the correctness of his arguments.

Mr. Giunta begins by using a rhetorical gambit that is actually fairly common among Catholic apologists — which is to move the goalposts of his own argument, and then to claim that his opponent has "misrepresented" his position. As a law student — which Mr. Giunta repeatedly reminds us that he is — he should know better. It's unfortunately that he chose this route, rather than simply addressing the substance of the issue at hand, but his arguments are what they are.

Mr. Giunta attempts to build his case that I created a "straw man" by stating, "I never claimed that the early Church subscribed precisely to the doctrine of transubstantiation..." That's well and good, because I never claimed that he said so. What is at stake here is the "substance" (no pun intended) of the doctrine, not whether the early church "precisely defined" the doctrine according to later medieval Aristotelian modes. By claiming that the early churches believed in the transmutation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, he is making a transubstantiationist claim — regardless of whether he thinks that these early Christians would have used the same terminology as medieval scholastic philosophers or not. What is at issue — and what I have repeatedly addressed — is simply the matter of the bread and wine becoming the blood and body of Jesus Christ, in a literal way. We don't have to talk about the later accretions of Aristotelian "substance and accidents" to investigate whether the fundamentals of transubstantiation (which, as the word suggests, involves the changing of the elements from one thing to another), the so-called "Real Presence," are correct or not.

Mr. Giunta's arguments here involve mainly the effort to distract the discussion away from the investigation of the evidences themselves, an investigation that goes rather poorly for the argument he is trying to make. He is trying to impute to my use of the term "transubstantiation" a meaning which I myself am not connoting to it. I am merely using the term for its convenience, and because the more basic sense of the term is that which is most generally used by most Catholic reference sources, which likewise do not delve into the realm of Aristotelian speculations. Indeed, as it is generally used in these sources, it has the same meaning that Mr. Giunta himself uses when discussing the "Real Presence," "The early Christians were adamant in professing their belief that the true Body and Blood of the risen Jesus Christ was present in the Eucharistic elements..." In short, Mr. Giunta has not suggested that the early patristics thought of transubstantiation in later scholastic terms, and I have not said that he — or they — did. I have addressed, however, his erroneous assumptions that these early patristics held to the fundamental principle of transmutation of the elements, without which there would be no "transubstantiation." Mr. Giunta would do well to address the actual evidences available to us, rather than engage in idle casuistry.

Ironically, immediately after committing this logical error, Mr. Giunta then proceeds to compound his problems even more. He states,

"...a term which Mr. Dunkin and other Fundamentalist polemicists take delight in fetishizing, evoking in the minds of their sola scriptura co-religionists all sorts of fantasies rooted in conspiracy theories of an ignorant Christian flock goaded by Machiavellian, pagan-sympathizing pastors "straying further and further away from Biblical truths, as the centuries went by." This is precisely the narrative put forward by Dan Brown, Michael Baigent, and the folks at the Jesus Seminar, except that they at least take this mythology to its logical conclusion, assuming that the Apostles themselves were the first to suffer from a sort of "Great Apostasy," forgetting and then manipulating the true teachings of the historical Jesus."

Amazingly, Mr. Giunta has managed, in the space of a single paragraph, to go from complaining about being the victim of a straw man argument to being the perpetrator of one! In point of fact, nowhere did I claim that the turning away from biblical truth in the early centuries of Christianity was the result of "ignorant Christian flock goaded by Machiavellian, pagan-sympathizing pastors." Further, nothing that I've said on the matter is "precisely the narrative" put forth by Brown, Baigent, etc. This claim is simply fantasy on Mr. Giunta's part — more evidence that he would rather argue via theatrics than from facts. As for my actual claim — that in the centuries after Christ, there was a gradually straying from Biblical truths, well, that much ought to be readily apparent to anyone who has actually read the patristic writers of the first few centuries of Christianity. Mr. Giunta himself admits my point that these writers often differed from each other substantially. This being the case, and even ignoring the various heresies that cropped up for centuries based on imperspicuous readings of the scripture (in other words, the belief that tradition and philosophic speculation must be added to the interpretation of Scripture, in much the same way as Catholicism itself does), we can see that my understanding of church history stands. There was great divergence among even the orthodox patristics — and they can't all have been right all the time, so this necessitates that we accept that some of them, or perhaps even most of them, at some points diverged from Biblical truths in some areas. The greater diversity as time went by suggests greater divergence. One need not posit any "conspiracy theories" to account for this. One merely needs to understand that people naturally have a tendency to depart from what is considered received truth, of any sort. It's a seemingly natural state of affairs that we can readily observe in everything from philosophy to politics.

Mr. Giunta then proceeds to make one of the most common, yet most incorrect, arguments by Catholic apologists. He says,

"The Protestant Fundamentalist would have us believe that succeeding generations of Christians from the Apostles drifted further and further away from Biblical truth, when in fact the Christian Bible itself is a product of centuries of post-apostolic doctrinal development... the New Testament did not achieve anything like a definitive composition until some time after the Roman Empire had adopted Christianity as its official creed. If one regards the early centuries of the Church as one of gradual apostasy, then one ought to at least be consistent and regard the New Testament itself as a product of an apostate Church."

Taken literally, this claim is of course so ludicrous that one is tempted to dispense with it entirely. There is quite an abundance of actual evidence — everything from papyri to vellum manuscripts to citations by the patristics in the first three centuries, dating to before the time of Constantine — for the existence of the New Testament scriptures from the beginnings of the Faith. These evidences show a remarkable uniformity in the biblical text, and they show that it was widespread, across geography and across translations. While we can be reasonably certain that the cost of manuscripts and the laboriousness of transcription would have precluded all but the wealthy from having access to personal copies of the Scripture, that the Scriptures were generally dispersed and therefore available to individual church bodies is practically beyond argument. That they had a definitive composition — that the words themselves were known and accepted by Christians across the Roman Empire and even outside of it — would be accepted by nearly all biblical and textual scholars except, perhaps, for the most radically revisionist.

But one supposes that what Mr. Giunta is really getting at is Catholicism's Sorelian myth that the Bible as we know it was "defined and assembled" at the Council of Carthage, that it was the product of the Most Holy Roman Catholic Church, and therefore Rome is the "decider" of the Bible as we know it, including the acceptance of the apocryphal books. Obviously, this belief is incorrect. We know, for instance, that lists of canon by various pre-Carthaginian writers (and even many afterward!) were basically the same as that which appears today in "Protestant" Bibles [1]. Further, the evidence of the patristic writers themselves shows that Christians from the beginning knew what was Bible and what was not. A systematic reading of these early Christian authors — in which it is helpful to approach them informationally, rather than devotionally — disproves the Catholic assertion implied by Mr. Giunta. Throughout the first three and a half centuries of Christian history (i.e. before Carthage, in 397), Christian writers demonstrated a ready use of every book of both the Old and New Testaments, as found in "Protestant" Bibles.

Their usage of the apocryphal books (termed "deuterocanonical" by Catholicism), however, is much more interesting and revealing. Basically, for the first couple of centuries after Christ, you see practically no usage of these apocryphal books by Christian writers whatsoever. Even when there is the occasional citation, the context suggests that these books were not being cited as doctrinally definitive — Maccabees, for example, might be cited as a history, in much the same way that Aristotle was cited as philosophy, but neither is obviously intended to determine Christian doctrine. Only when we get well into the third century do we see some writers begin to make greater use of the apocrypha, and even then it was only some writers, and their uses were only sporadically doctrinal. By the fourth century, when Carthage took place, we see more general use.

It's telling that the greater use of the apocryphal books roughly coincides with the revision of the Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) made near the beginning of the third century AD by Theodotion, an Ebionite heretic. Unlike previous versions of the Greek Old Testament, Theodotion's revision included some of the apocryphal writings, and came to be widely used by Christians from the third century onward [2]. From there, we see Theodotion's revision used as one of Origen's sources for his Hexapla, his own revision of the Septuagint, and the source from which we first see the full set of apocryphal books introduced into the Old Testament. Nolan notes that Origen, in fact, drew upon the scriptural revisions of a number of heretical sources — Symmachus, Theodotion, and Aquila prominently — to revise the Old Testament [3], and it was from these that he introduced the apocryphal books into his canon. Hence, the introduction of the apocryphal books into the canon of the Old Testament held to by Rome was made from heretical sources. The famed textual critic Kenyon indirectly notes the influence which Origen and the Alexandrian school had on introducing the apocryphal books into the Christian mainstream, when he wrote,

"It is noticeable that while there are many quotations in the New Testament from each group of books in the Old, there is not a single direct quotation from the Apocrypha. A similar distinction is found in Josephus and Philo. It was probably only in Alexandria that the apocryphal books had equal currency with the canonical." [4]

This perfectly illustrates the point I made previously about divergence and straying. Near the beginning of Christianity, we don't see these books used. Only after a few centuries do we see them come into acceptance, finally being inserted into the canon of Scripture by a very late Council. The "definitive composition" of the Bible that Mr. Giunta credits to his Church is the perfect illustration of the straying from truth that I wrote about. Earlier Christianity, if the actual evidence of usage is to be considered of greater weight than the arguments from later and redacted tradition, had a different "definitive composition" of their Bibles (which they did indeed have, Mr. Giunta) than later Catholics had. Despite the claims, Rome was not the "determiner" of the Bible, and does not have the authority to tell us what we must and must not believe from Scripture.

This brings us, then, to an interesting paradox. Mr. Giunta, as the Catholic apologist, as the defender of Holy Tradition against all innovators and gainsayers, is himself the defender of what was originally innovation. This, then, bears on his belief in transubstantiation and its development as doctrine centuries after the foundation of the Christian faith. Mr. Giunta states, "The great bulk of the Christian world does trace the doctrine of the Real Presence (or, if you would, "transubstantiation") to the Bible. It goes without saying that Mr. Dunkin does not subscribe to the traditional exegesis." By "traditional exegesis," is of course meant the attempts to read the "Real Presence" into passages such John chapter 6, efforts which ignore pertinent context, both textual and theological. But yet, this "traditional exegesis" is only traditional because it was accepted as such centuries after John wrote his epistle under the inspiration of God. True enough, I don't accept this "traditional exegesis." Nor, for that matter, did Augustine or Theodoret or Clement of Alexandria or Tertullian or Eusebius... When one reads the patristic writers without the a priori assumption that what they were really teaching all along was Catholic doctrine, even if in an incipient form, one clearly can see the development of what would eventually be Catholic doctrines, but which originally were not, even in embryonic form. Their tradition was not the tradition being defended by Mr. Giunta.

This returns us back to the argument that Catholic tradition, and its traditional views of church history and doctrine, are part of a sectarian narrative that was created to substantiate Catholic claims to authority and originality. As with the "traditional account" of Muslim history that fails to find support in actual empirical evidences, so also does the actual evidence of the patristic writers fail to support the traditional Catholic account of church history and the originality of much of what is distinctively Catholic (in the broad sense, to include Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy) doctrine. Mr. Giunta's repetitive assertions to the contrary do not change this. He didn't deal with the evidences or my arguments in a really serious way, he merely expressed his dismay and horror that I would be as gauche as to disagree with Tradition. After all, don't I realize that even Protestant historians accept the traditional account given to us by Catholicism? He fails to understand that I feel no more obligated to accept shoddy history when it is propounded by a Protestant historian than I do when it is propounded by Catholic apologists.

Mr. Giunta tries, again, to draw a false analogy between the development of the doctrine of the Trinity and the development of the doctrine of transubstantiation. I will grant that the articulation of both doctrines was the result of a process of development. However, there's a critical difference that Mr. Giunta's arguments (which essentially revolve around the issue of articulation) fail to recognize. The Trinity can be derived from the Scriptures, and was by Christians from the very start, even when they did not use the term "Trinity" in describing the nature of the Godhead. This same cannot be said for transubstantiation. It's noteworthy that those passages of the patristics from which Mr. Giunta attempts to derive their support for transubstantiation do not make a hermeneutic attempt to support the doctrine from Scripture, whereas those writers who wrote about the Trinity did.

Later, Mr. Giunta asks, "Even today's Catholics believe and profess that the sacraments are symbols! How many times do I need to repeat this before it sinks in?" Eric, the problem is not that we didn't hear you the first time, the problem is that you aren't using the term the same way that I, and Dan Popp before me, are using it. Mr. Giunta is using a parochially Catholic definition of the term, what we might call a "realistic-symbol" sense of the term, while Popp and I began our discussions by using what may be termed a "symbolic-symbol" sense. What's fundamentally at issue in this discussion is whether or not the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ — not by faith, but in actuality. Mr. Giunta says yes, and I say no. The apologetic Catholic use of the term "symbol" refers to the elements, though changed, remaining "invisible to the senses." That use of the term "symbol" doesn't address what has actually been under discussion per the patristics that have been cited. Mr. Popp and myself have argued that the bread and wine are symbolic, not in the sense that they their altered state remains insensible, but in the sense that they do not change their nature at all — their use in the ritual of the Lord's Supper is purely representational of the reality which is Christ Himself. Mr. Giunta's definition of "symbol," as apologetically Catholic as it may be, is not relevant to the actual direction of the discussion.

It is exactly this sort of attempt at redefining terms, however, that is the cause for my contention that Mr. Giunta is anachronizing Catholic doctrine back onto the first centuries of Christianity. As I stated above, nobody has argued that he is applying the very technical, medieval scholastic definition of the term "transubstantiation" backwards, as he seems to believe we are doing. But, he is applying backwards the commonly understood sense of "transubstantiation" — the idea that the bread and wine somehow or another become the actual, literal body and blood of Christ — back onto Christians who don't really seem to have had a sense that the bread and wine were doing that. He does so by assuming that when patristic writers make reference to the "body and blood of Christ," then it must mean that they have the Catholic teaching of the "Real Presence," of transubstantiation, in mind. As I've shown from a number of examples, this is not the case.

Mr. Giunta addressed the evidence from Justin Martyr that is often adduced as support for transubstantiation. Again, as with some other citations from the patristics, we see that Mr. Giunta's supposition is not (or at least not necessarily) supported by the citation he provides. He emphasizes this from Justin,

"...For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh..."

Sounds very supportive of Mr. Giunta's position, right? Well, let's not forget that this passage — if we wish to use it as evidence for Justin's theology — cannot be taken apart from the context of his other statements, such as the one I cited in my previous article, in which Justin states that the bread and wine are taken in remembrance of Christ's body and blood, and in which he seems to suggest that these elements don't literally become Christ's flesh and blood. What is the synthesis of what Justin says? It is simply, as I pointed out from scholarly evidences by those who know more about this matter than either me or Mr. Giunta, that Justin held to some form of consubstantial view, much like that held by Luther. By merely pointing to phrases like "not as common bread and common drink..." (which I, as a Baptist, would have no disagreement with!), Mr. Giunta hopes to read back into Justin the Catholic sense of these terms. But it doesn't work.

In summary, he simply has not made the case that we must accept that these early Christian writers believed that the bread and wine become the literal body and blood of Christ, as it taught in by the Catholic religion.

And now, for another of my esteemed colleagues here at Renew America, Helen Valois,

"...It is not we who eat human flesh — they among you who assert such a thing have been suborned as false witnesses; it is among you that Pelops is made a supper for the gods, although beloved by Poseidon, and Kronos devours his children, and Zeus swallows Metis." [5]

Bishop Kaye, notes that the notion that Christians "ate human flesh" resulted from a pagan misunderstanding of the Lord's Supper which supposed that literal flesh and blood of Christ was being eaten [6].

"Nor indeed was there any necessity for my refuting these, except that I see you still in dubiety about the word of the truth. For though yourself prudent, you endure fools gladly. Otherwise you would not have been moved by senseless men to yield yourself to empty words, and to give credit to the prevalent rumor wherewith godless lips falsely accuse us, who are worshippers of God, and are called Christians, alleging that the wives of us all are held in common and made promiscuous use of; and that we even commit incest with our own sisters, and, what is most impious and barbarous of all, that we eat human flesh." [7]

"Then, again, how can they say that the flesh, which is nourished with the body of the Lord and with His blood, goes to corruption, and does not partake of life? Let them, therefore, either alter their opinion, or cease from offering the things just mentioned. But our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion. For we offer to Him His own, announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the flesh and Spirit. For as the bread, which is produced from the earth, when it receives the invocation of God, is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly; so also our bodies, when they receive the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of the resurrection to eternity." [8]

"Come now, when you read in the words of David, how that 'the Lord reigneth from the tree,' I want to know what you understand by it. Perhaps you think some wooden king of the Jews is meant! — and not Christ, who overcame death by His suffering on the cross, and thence reigned! Now, although death reigned from Adam even to Christ, why may not Christ be said to have reigned from the tree, from His having shut up the kingdom of death by dying upon the tree of His cross? This tree it is which Jeremiah likewise gives you intimation of, when he prophesies to the Jews, who should say, 'Come, let us destroy the tree with the fruit, (the bread) thereof,' that is, His body. For so did God in your own gospel even reveal the sense, when He called His body bread; so that, for the time to come, you may understand that He has given to His body the figure of bread, whose body the prophet of old figuratively turned into bread, the Lord Himself designing to give by and by an interpretation of the mystery." [9]

"He says, it is true, that 'the flesh profiteth nothing;' but then, as in the former case, the meaning must be regulated by the subject which is spoken of. Now, because they thought His discourse was harsh and intolerable, supposing that He had really and literally enjoined on them to eat his flesh, He, with the view of ordering the state of salvation as a spiritual thing, set out with the principle, 'It is the spirit that quickeneth; 'and then added, 'The flesh profiteth nothing,'-meaning, of course, to the giving of life. He also goes on to explain what He would have us to understand by spirit: 'The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' In a like sense He had previously said: 'He that heareth my words, and believeth on Him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but shall pass from death unto life.' Constituting, therefore, His word as the life-giving principle, because that word is spirit and life, He likewise called His flesh by the same appellation; because, too, the Word had become flesh, we ought therefore to desire Him in order that we may have life, and to devour Him with the ear, and to ruminate on Him with the understanding, and to digest Him by faith." [10]

"And entertaining this view, we may regard the proclamation of the Gospel, which is universally diffused, as milk; and as meat, faith, which from instruction is compacted into a foundation, which, being more substantial than hearing, is likened to meat, and assimilates to the soul itself nourishment of this kind. Elsewhere the Lord, in the Gospel according to John, brought this out by symbols, when He said: "Eat ye my flesh, and drink my blood;" describing distinctly by metaphor the drinkable properties of faith and the promise, by means of which the Church, like a human being consisting of many members, is refreshed and grows, is welded together and compacted of both, — of faith, which is the body, and of hope, which is the soul; as also the Lord of flesh and blood. For in reality the blood of faith is hope, in which faith is held as by a vital principle." [11]

"To be sure, we often speak in the following way: As Pascha approaches, we say that tomorrow, or the day after, is 'the Passion of the Lord,' although He suffered so many years before, and His Passion occurred only once. Indeed, on that particular Lord's Day we say 'Today the Lord has risen,' although many, many years have passed since the time when he arose. Why is it that there is no one so foolish as to accuse us of being liars when we speak in this way? It is because we name these days according to a likeness to the days on which those events took place. Thus a day, which is not the actual day, but like to it in the circle of the year, takes its name from the actual day because of the celebration of the sacrament which occurred, not on the very day of the celebration, but long ago....For if sacraments did not have a certain likeness to the things of which they are the sacraments, they would not be sacraments at all....Therefore....in a certain way the sacrament of the body of Christ is the body of Christ." [12]

"And because He walked here in very flesh, and gave that very flesh to us to eat for our salvation; and no one eateth that flesh, unless he hath first worshipped: we have found out in what sense such a footstool of our Lord's may be worshipped, and not only that we sin not in worshipping it, but that we sin in not worshipping. But doth the flesh give life? Our Lord Himself, when He was speaking in praise of this same earth, said, 'It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing'. ...But when our Lord praised it, He was speaking of His own flesh, and He had said, 'Except a man eat My flesh, he shall have no life in him.' Some disciples of His, about seventy, were offended, and said, 'This is an hard saying, who can hear it?' And they went back, and walked no more with Him. It seemed unto them hard that He said, 'Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, ye have no life in you:' they received it foolishly, they thought of it carnally, and imagined that the Lord would cut off parts from His body, and give unto them; and they said, 'This is a hard saying.' It was they who were hard, not the saying; for unless they had been hard, and not meek, they would have said unto themselves, He saith not this without reason, but there must be some latent mystery herein. They would have remained with Him, softened, not hard: and would have learnt that from Him which they who remained, when the others departed, learnt. For when twelve disciples had remained with Him, on their departure, these remaining followers suggested to Him, as if in grief for the death of the former, that they were offended by His words, and turned back. But He instructed them, and saith unto them, 'It is the Spirit that quickeneth, but the flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I have spoken unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.' Understand spiritually what I have said; ye are not to eat this body which ye see; nor to drink that blood which they who will crucify Me shall pour forth. I have commended unto you a certain mystery; spiritually understood, it will quicken. Although it is needful that this be visibly celebrated, yet it must be spiritually understood." [13]

Happy New Year, Helen!

NOTES:














© Tim Dunkin