Friday, July 12, 2024

Steven Nemes on the Inconsistency to Appealing to a theology of the Real Presence in John 6

  

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)