Get over it: the early church wasn't Baptist

By Eric Giunta

I appreciate the opportunity to respond to yet another RenewAmerica contributor promoting revisionist readings of Christian history. While I continue to believe RenewAmerica is not the best setting to have these particular debates, I am compelled to respond in a mode comparable to the initial accusations. Hence, this article.

I encourage my readers to review Mr. Tim Dunkins's piece here, to which this article is a response. Just to be clear, the following arguments are not intended to be considered in isolation from my previous contributions to this discussion.

Let me begin with a few observations, as a student of history. The question of determining the creedal orientation of the early church is not one that can be resolved by reading any one Father, doctor, or saint in isolation from his broader religious context. One has to have a literate understanding of the early Church, not only the theological consensuses of early Christian teachers, but early Christian art and architecture, Christian liturgy, popular piety, and, of course, the Scriptures (a rather loosely defined canonical collection before the late 4th century).

When the Fathers as a whole, for instance, are so unanimous on an essential point of doctrine, and another Father appears to be teaching contrary to this unanimity without incurring any scandal or controversy, one has to at least consider the possibility that the appearance ought not to be taken at face-value.

This is not special pleading on my part, but sound historiography, one to which Christian believers (Catholic and Protestant) adhere to all the time, when we contest secularist or leftist-Christian assertions of multiple Christianities taught by the Apostles, for instance the oft-repeated claim that the religion of Paul differed from that of James and/or other Apostles, or that the Apostles themselves misunderstood Jesus, manipulating His teachings without anyone raising so much as a wimper in protest.

I don't know of any historian who claims that the early Church held to a symbolist understanding of the Eucharist. The consensus on this matter was summed up by the late Protestant church historian J. N. D. Kelley thusly:

Ignatius [of Antioch] roundly declares that . . . [t]he bread is the flesh of Jesus, the cup his blood. Clearly he intends this realism to be taken strictly, for he makes it the basis of his argument against the Docetists' denial of the reality of Christ's body. . . . Irenaeus teaches that the bread and wine are really the Lord's body and blood. His witness is, indeed, all the more impressive because he produces it quite incidentally while refuting the Gnostic and Docetic rejection of the Lord's real humanity.

Hippolytus speaks of 'the body and the blood' through which the Church is saved, and Tertullian regularly describes the bread as 'the Lord's body.' The converted pagan, he remarks, 'feeds on the richness of the Lord's body, that is, on the Eucharist.' The realism of his theology comes to light in the argument, based on the intimate relation of body and soul, that just as in baptism the body is washed with water so that the soul may be cleansed, so in the Eucharist 'the flesh feeds upon Christ's body and blood so that the soul may be filled with God.' Clearly his assumption is that the Savior's body and blood are as real as the baptismal water. Cyprian's attitude is similar. Lapsed Christians who claim communion without doing penance, he declares, 'do violence to his body and blood, a sin more heinous against the Lord with their hands and mouths than when they denied him.' Later he expatiates on the terrifying consequences of profaning the sacrament, and the stories he tells confirm that he took the Real Presence literally.

Eucharistic teaching, it should be understood at the outset, was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Savior's body and blood.

{Early Christian Doctrines, 197-198, 211-212, 440}

For more articulations of this consensus, from Protestant sources, see: "History of the Doctrine of the Eucharist"

Note again what I am not asserting. I am not arguing that each and every orthodox Christian Father before the late Middle Ages would, absent a solemn definition by the Church, have framed their Eucharistic doctrine in terms of the Aristotelian metaphysics presupposed in the word transubstantiation, no more than these Fathers necessarily would have regarded each and every book of our present New Testament as canonical Scripture to the exclusion of all others. Nor should we expect them to. The entire history of the Church is one of organic development, with theological language and doctrinal minutiae the subject of much of it. One does not determine the "denominational" allegiance or orientation of the early Church by picking up 16th century Catechisms and looking for a precise fit from those who lived 13, 14, and 15 centuries prior. One looks at the overall character of the early Church and asks, Which church(es) today best represent the organic outgrowth of the earliest churches?

When one considers the overall orientation of the early Church (liturgical worship, monarchical episcopate, realist understandings of the sacraments, veneration of saints and relics, flourishing representational art, an ever-developing Mariology, Roman primacy, a robust conciliarism, prayers for the dead, distinctions between mortal/venial sins, salvation by faith and works, etc.), the picture painted is not primitive Protestantism, but primitive Catholicism. That is my point.

But I don't wish to exaggerate it, and neither should Mr. Dunkin. As our colleague Dan Popp would have to agree, considering his excellent studies on the issue, the early Church did not exactly come into being with a robust Trinitatian Christology. The Church reached her dogmatic conclusions at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon through organic development, and not a little debate, but it would clearly be erroneous to claim, as secularists and Biblical Unitarians do, the Christ's divinity was strictly "unsettled" before, say, the year 325. Historical revisionism notwithstanding, none of the early Fathers regarded Jesus to be an ordinary man. No one denied his divinity, but there was plenty of debate regarding the theological implications of this divinity: how it related to that of the Father, and how a distinction within the Godhead was to be squared with monotheism. Many of the pre-Nicene orthodox Fathers embraced language which would be unacceptable to Christians of later ages — not because they were heretics, but because they lacked a precise theological vocabulary with which to frame difficult doctrines, and it was left to them to crystallize the implications of the Apostolic teaching, and bequeath Christological formulae that orthodox Christians today take for granted.

And so with the Eucharist. It simply is not the case that any Father (as far as we can tell, anyway) evinced a strictly symbolist understanding of the Eucharist. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church summarizes the evidence succinctly:

That the Eucharist conveyed to the believer the Body and Blood of Christ was universally accepted from the first. The Eucharistic elements were themselves commonly referred to as the Body and Blood. During the patristic period some theologians wrote as if they believed that the bread and wine persisted after the consecration, others as if they held that they were no longer there; there was no attempt at precise definition. After the controversies arising from assertions by Paschasius Radbertus in the 9th century and Berengar in the 11th, definition was felt to be desirable. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) used the term "transubstantiation" to assert the Real Presence against the Cathari.

{From the entry "Eucharist"}

To argue that that the symbolist understandings of Radbertus and Barengarius illustrate the orthodoxy of symbolist Eucharistic theology is facially fallacious. That's like saying the emergence of the dualist Cathari (Albigensians) is proof-positive that monotheism was not settled doctrine by the 13th century, or that the presence of heretical pastors and teachers in today's conservative denominations (who deny any manner of orthodox Christian teaching, especially with regards to sexuality) proves that fundamental Christian teachings are still considered up for grabs by the traditional denominations, or that they have not been historically settled.

Br. Dunkins's cherry-picked citations do no violence to the scholarly consensus I have referred to, when the theological background is kept in mind. That Pope Saint Gelasius I caused absolutely no uproar, absolutely no controversy over his articulation of Eucharistic doctrine strongly militates against a symbolist understanding of his words. Given the historical context, it's rather obvious that he is speaking phenomenologically, not using the words "substance" and "nature" according to Aristotelian categories, usages which would have been absolutely foreign to most minds of the Latin Christian West in the late 5th century. In any event, St Gelasius is clearly not a symbolist. Look again at his words, in their larger context, which Dunkins omits:

Surely, the sacrament we take of the Lord's body and blood is a divine thing, on account of which, and by the same, we partake of the Divine nature; and yet the substance of the bread and wine does not cease to be. And certainly the image and similitude of Christ's body and blood are celebrated in the action of the mysteries: it is therefore shewn to us evidently enough that the same is to be felt by us in the Lord Christ Himself which we profess, celebrate, and are. Just as they [the bread and wine] pass into the Divine substance by the operation of the Holy Spirit, while nevertheless remaining in the peculiarity of their nature, such is the principal mystery itself [the Incarnation] whose efficacy and virtue they truly represent.

The most anti-Catholic reading one can possibly take from this is that the 5th century Pontiff subscribed to what would later be termed consubstantiation, namely that the Eucharistic bread is somehow mystically joined to the Body and Blood of Jesus, and truly contains It. If this is the case, it should not scandalize any Catholic, but neither should Baptists with an axe to grind appropriate Gelasisus's teaching as their own. I have long been impressed with the reverence Baptists show at their Eucharists, what must for them be a mere piece of bread. But no educated Baptist I know would speak of the Eucharist in remotely Gelasian terms. The Pope's teaching is a lot closer to that of 13th century Catholicism than it is to 16th century anabaptist memorialism.

The same is to be said for the teaching of Saint Theodoret. Again I give some more context:

For even after the consecration the mystic symbols are not deprived of their own nature; they remain in their former substance, figure and form; they are visible and tangible as they were before. But they are regarded as what they have become, and believed so to be, and are worshipped as being what they are believed to be.

Dunkins's citations of Augustine are a little more egregious, as they ignore completely the Bishop of Hippo's other passages where his understanding of the Eucharist is shown to be emphatically Catholic. He also repeats Br. Popp's error of regarding the word spiritual as somehow antithetical to the Catholic and Orthodox Eucharist. So let me reiterate:

The Catholic Eucharist is spiritual! It is an act of divine grace! Christ's communication to believers of his incorruptible Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity under the forms of bread and wine is accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit, whom we invoke during the Eucharistic Prayer (and all throughout our liturgies) for this very purpose! Christ did not expect his disciples to chase after him with forks and knives, or to grill his crucified flesh for a communal Bar-B-Q after they took him down from the cross and the women anointed it with a bottle of A1. That is the carnality for which Jesus rebuked his disciples in John 6; that is true cannibalism. The Catholic Eucharist is not even remotely that.

I'll let Augustine's words speak for themselves otherwise:

And he was carried in his own hands. But, brethren, how is it possible for a man to do this? Who can understand it? Who is it that is carried in his own hands? A man can be carried in the hands of another; but no one can be carried in his own hands. How this should be understood literally of David, we cannot discover; but we can discover how it was meant of Christ. For Christ was carried in His own hands, when, referring to His own Body, He said: This is My Body. For He carried that Body in His hands.

. . .

I promised you, who have now been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the Sacrament of the Lord's Table, which you now look upon and of which you last night were made participants. You ought to know what you have received, what you are going to receive, and what you ought to receive daily. That Bread which you see on the altar, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the Body of Christ. That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been sanctified by the word of God, is the Blood of Christ. Through that bread and wine the Lord Christ willed to commend His Body and Blood, which He poured out for us unto the forgiveness of sins. If you receive worthily, you are what you have received.

. . .

What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the Body of Christ and the chalice the Blood of Christ. . . . How is the bread His Body? And the chalice, or what is in the chalice, how is it His Blood? Those elements, brethren, are called Sacraments, because in them one thing is seen, but another is understood. What is seen is the corporeal species, but what is understood is the spiritual fruit. . . . You, however, are the Body of Christ and His members. If, therefore, you are the Body of Christ and His members, your mystery is presented at the table of the Lord, you receive your mystery. To that which you are, you answer: Amen; and by answering, you subscribe to it. For you hear: The Body of Christ! and you answer: Amen! Be a member of Christ's Body, so that your Amen may be the truth.

[In other words: You are what you eat!-ed.]

{Source}

I will conclude with a short reflection:[1] Too many American Christians are grossly ignorant of the existence of the Eastern Churches, made up of Christians belonging to the historic churches of Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Asia Minor, India, and Eastern Europe. If it is the case, as some polemicists assert (explicitly and implicitly) that "transubstantiation" is late medieval innovation, how does one possibly explain the doctrinal unity of these Eastern churches with Catholicism? How on earth did the Popes and Western Bishops pull that one off?! Why does not a single one of these churches (whether Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental, or Assyrian) scream Innovation! when they themselves have never framed their doctrines in Aristotelian terms, and yet are one with their Western Catholic brethren in professing a very realist understanding of the Eucharist? The answer is obvious. The doctrine of the Real Presence is a direct inheritance from the Apostolic Church; Fundamentalist Protestant conspiracy theories to the contrary ignore the historical record in favor of ideological abstractions dangerously reminiscent of leftist Constitutional hermeneutic.

I'll leave my colleague Dan Popp to rebut Mr. Dunkins's aberrant ecclesiology. Looking up the word "church" in any mainstream Bible dictionary is enough to rebut the silly assertion that the word never refers to the universal communion of all believers. To my knowledge, Dunkins's understanding is not even shared by the vast majority of congregationalists, and it is completely foreign to how the Christian Church has always understood its own Scriptures.

Christian denominationalism is a subject which fascinates me, but I simply have no time to keep up with every theological fad that pops up in these "New Testament" assemblies, fads which somehow always end up affirming the political and/or cultural prejudices of the one reading the Scriptures with "itching ears."

The Church of the New Testament is Christ's Mystical Body and Bride; orthodox Christianity knows only one Jesus, and he's no polygamist.

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© Eric Giunta