It does not seem consistent to appeal
to the bread of life discourse and the injunction to eat Christ’s flesh in
order to justify the opinion that the bread and wine of the eucharistic meal really
are his body and blood, only later to object to the supposed literalism of the objection
that there would seem to be in that scheme no sense in which Christ’s flesh is
really being eaten. It was precisely the idea that Christ’s flesh must be
really eaten in some way that motivated the conclusion that the bread and wine
of the Eucharist are really his body and blood! But if his flesh does not literally
need to be eaten, then there is as yet no reason to think that the bread and
wine really are his flesh and blood. The less literal the eating must be, the
less reason there is to take Jesus’s words in a robustly realist sense. The
proponent of the Real Presence paradigm may say that Christ’s flesh is being
eaten in the sense that the symbols of his body and blood are being consumed.
But this answer is compatible with rejecting the Real Presence idea that the
bread and wine of the eucharistic meal really are his body and blood. It may be
that the real consumption of the bread and wine in the context of the Eucharist
provides an occasion when conditions are proper for the effecting of a robust
union between Christ and the believer. But so long as Jesus’s body and blood
are not locally present where the bread and wine are being consumed, there is
no reason why that process can be called “eating Christ’s flesh.” And to the
extent that what the Real Presence paradigm proposes cannot be described as “eating
Christ’s flesh,” one should conclude that it has little or nothing to do with
what Jesus talks about in the bread of life discourse and thus cannot be
supported by appeal to it. (Steven Nemes, Eating Christ’s Flesh: A Case for Memorialism
[Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2023], 35)
