A Letter from a Not-Featherweight Sparring Partner -- Unabridged David Elliot This letter was never published in Vulgata in this form.  For the abridged version, which appeared in Issue IX, click here.  Also note that formatting like italics is not in this version because of technical difficulties (by which I mean I can't be bothered).

Dave Elliot's Issue V article, Christ in the Eucharist, found its way into the hands of a well-known American Protestant pro-life activist  who wrote him a rebuttal (no, really, we're not kidding).  What follows is Dave's reply.  We have been asked to not print the correspondence from Dave's Protestant counterpart, out of his desire not to alienate the Catholic wing of the pro-life movement.  For the original, unabridged text of the letter, click here.

My apologies for not having written back sooner, but what with employers, publishers,  pro-life colleagues, and family all pawing at my arm and plucking my sleeve to work, meet deadlines, give talks, and fetch groceries; each tick of the clock has been amply spoken for.

Though when I read your paper I itched for my pen out of a delighted desire to respond, the thirst for "good adventure" had to be put off.  I must say from the outset that it is an honour and a joy to be considered a not featherweight sparring partner by such a warrior for life and truth, and though I can think of hundreds of others far worthier of your steel, "Oft shall help come from the weak when the eyes of the great are elsewhere".   Thank you as well for the Pro-life 101 manual.  At NCLN we use a pared down version of it which we hand out to the students in class.  Heaven knows that the Life issues have been ridden over roughshod by bombast and duplicity.  A little light and logic, then, is just what the apologist ordered.  So God bless you for your work.

Scott, I found your response to be kindly worded, logically well-knit, and magnanimous in spirit, but after much prayer and study, it has only left me more certain that the Eucharist, the mystery which made the saints sing in a voice of fire, whose rumour whispers through all the leaves of Scripture, is indeed what the Church has always said it is: the Real Presence of Christ in our midst.  As to particulars regarding your paper, here are my two (Canadian) cents:

In your opening paragraph, I found with surprise that Scott Hahn, a man whose love for Scripture could almost be described as seraphic, had been dismissed as being "rather bombastic" with "a habit of using sloppy exegesis when interpreting texts".  Here I must respectfully disagree.  As to the first charge, I would say that given Scriptural incidents such as Elijah's rough and tumble preaching style (the locusts on his breath, the wild honey in his beard), John the Baptist's rather fire-breathed sermons to the Pharisees, Our Lord's lack of the genteel in toppling the hucksters tables etc., the only relevant question regarding a more vehement evangelism is: is it to a purpose, or to no purpose?  Contrived trumpetry or holy animation?  A narcissistic exercise or a godly appeal? If it is the former; then we have only another Pharisee or spoiled saint, one justly dismissed on the grounds of "bombast".  If the latter, then I think we need to respect the fact that Christ speaks to us through whispers with some, with a megaphone through others.  "Subtle as a serpent and harmless as a dove", yes, but "Zeal for thy house will consume me", and not always in a gingerly fashion.  We have been exhorted to imitate Christ the "Lion of Judah".  Who can fault the on-fire Christian for sometimes resembling a lion?  As to "sloppy exegesis", I would only refer you to the transcripts of his debates with Reformed theologians where his exposition of the Gospels, like a torch which the more it is shaken the more it shines, not only survived being put to the test, but to my mind, burned the brighter.   Still more profitable, perhaps, would be a read of Stephen Ray's Crossing the Tiber.  As mellow as you please, and erudite as you could hope, I think you would find it rewarding.

As to your dissatisfaction with the word "fundamentalist", I think I know exactly where you are coming from.  After having seen the litany of vituperation which attaches to the word "Catholic" in some, more strident quarters (where we are called Papists, Romanists, Jesuitical, Babylonian etc.) I have a cordial dislike for all such invenomated language.  It smacks too much of the implicit ad hominem.  But "fundamentalist" (as I understand it) refers to the movement which began in the late nineteenth century under the aegis of conservative Protestants who opposed Social liberalism, Darwinian evolution, and Biblical imbecility of all kinds.  And to this every Catholic gives a resounding "Amen".  But there was a thorn in the rose; there was mud in the silver fountain.  The 12 volume series The Fundamentals  (from which the new movement drew its name) included two conspicuous pieces entitled "Rome: Antagonist of the Nations", and "Catholicism: Is it Christian?"  Soon the movement as a whole was permeated by a virulent anti-Catholicism.  This movement in particular is what is referred to, then, when the term "fundamentalist" appears in a Catholic work.  It is not used as a buzzword for "muddleheaded, cultic, snakehandling, madman" in the vile journalistic sense criticized by Plantinga.  If the word has been too smeared to be used without implicit caricature, then I hope you will forgive me and rest assured that though the readership of Vulgata (the magazine in which it was published) was presented with it in its per se theological sense as opposed to any quasi-terrorist sense; they will not be presented with it again.
One last qualification.  The objection is brought up that my paper is self-refuting since, with poker-like bluff, I trumpet that "the dialectical case for the Eucharist is ironclad" but then demur, calling it "a great mystery, a scandal to reason".  All that supposed lightning logic just swallowed up by mystical fog, then.  As if that wasn't bad enough, I cap off the sophistry by arguing my case with poor, anathematized old reason!  Clearly it seems I've stuck my pen in my mouth.  But here I would break in and say that while the objections given were lucid and agile, they rested upon we two men talking at utter cross-purposes.  I have been judged in vacuo, with no consideration for the audience I was addressing, and in the assumption that "mystery" means "unarguable" (which it doesn't), instead of "abstruse" yet "without illogic" (which it does).  To clarify, then, mention of the "dialectical case" and "logical spelunking" one could take the Eucharist into was meant to earmark the fact that I proposed to treat the Eucharist biblically (from the pages of Scripture) as opposed to metaphysically (from the pages of Aristotle).  The "ironclad" case was thus not mine at all, but one detailing proofs on how a thing can be in several places at once, how one material substance can be wholly made into another, and how substance and accidents can vary in one body.  This is the sort of "scandal to reason" dealt with in the recommended piece by Elizabeth Anscombe.  But such concerns naturally fell beyond the scope of my little paper.

You also state that I should have given "a contextual verse by verse analysis of the passage (John 6)", for the article to be "taken seriously" as an apologetic, but note again that I was writing ad populum, not ad clerum; for the busy layman with little time, not for scholars with no time for anything else.  The demand for a verse by verse analysis would have been unreasonable in such a setting.  This is not to say that the ivory tower does not have its place.  It does indeed.  But not where the ABC's are being taught.

I have gone over the first segment of your argument several times now but still fail to grasp how it is not at loggerheads with the basic Biblical principles to which both Catholic and Protestant scholars give assent.  The argument given is based on chronology, and states that in John 6, where Jesus says that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood, the passage "clearly … did not and cannot … have the Eucharist in mind".  And why, pray?  Because "the episode in John 6 happened before the institution of the Eucharist recorded in the other gospels.  Therefore, none of the original hearers would have understood Jesus to be referencing the Eucharist."  Cannot is a very strong term, one to which both mainline Catholic and Protestant scholarship, the Church Fathers themselves, and your own colleague Greg Koukl (in an article sent to me) would all disagree.  Did not is milder, but why does John 6 not (as the ancient, medieval, and modern Church all maintain) not only "reference the Eucharist", but proclaim it boldly, all guns blazing and all flags flying?  The reason given is that "Christ equated his body and blood with the Eucharist at the Last Supper - long after the events of John 6", but my question is this: what would Christ have to have said to make it clear that He was equating His body and blood with the Eucharist in John 6?  How far is the goal post to be moved before the striker can score?  Would "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh" (Jn 6:51) be sufficient?  And yet Christ has already said this.  Here Christ says that He is bread, that it gives supernatural life, and that the same bread is His flesh to be eaten.  Likewise, at the Last Supper He gives the apostles bread, says it is His body, and distributes it to them all to be eaten.  And notice that Christ does not then backpedal on the imagery.  Instead He belabours the same theme, saying: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you … For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink … This is the bread which came down from heaven" (v. 53,55,58).  Here He affirms that this bread is His flesh and that it is to be consumed along with the blood; just as, at the Last Supper, the bread is called His body and is to be received along with the blood. The two passages are perfectly fitted, literarily, theologically, and philologically.  The additional fact that of the 365 days of the Jewish Calendar, both John 6 and the Last Supper take place during the same feast of Passover where a lamb, bread, and wine were all consumed, also smells to me like a divine conspiracy.  So how then, unless you assume a priori that the Eucharist could not be His flesh and blood (but this would be begging the question), can these two passages be seen as at odds with each other? I am beginning to fear that the goal post has been so far removed that Our Lord would have to have taken out a knife and begun right then and there to carve out portions of His flesh in order to get us all to agree that He was speaking of the Eucharist in this passage.

 But, you say, "the episode in John 6 happened before the institution of the Eucharist recorded in the other gospels.  Therefore, none of the original hearers would have understood Jesus to be referencing the Eucharist".  And here is where I am really at a loss.  Are we to understand, then, that reference to an event or doctrine in the Gospel cannot precede its actualization?  That the camel's nose can't enter the tent before its hump, that the mustard seed can't be planted before the birds nest in its branches?  For this is what the argument implies.  But if John 6 can't be pointing to the Eucharist because it was only institutionalized at the Last Supper, then we are in a lot more trouble than either of us banked on.  Why?  Simply because Our Lord habitually taught in this manner.  Perhaps an illustration may help.  Where I work at in Toronto we always serve hors doevres first, the entrée second, the main course third, and dessert last of all.  We might also say that Christ prepares food for our minds in the same way.  Take, for example, the Passion of Christ. In the Old Testament we find the "hors doevres", that is, the subtle prefiguration of saving deeds to come (such as Isaiah 53's prophecy of the "suffering servant" who will "bear our iniquities").  At this point there is very little clear understanding.  In the main body of the New Testament we find the entrée, that is, Our Lord's spiritual teaching of the saving event (such as "The Son of Man will be delivered into the power of men; they will put him to death” [Mk 9:32]).  And here He usually meets with misunderstandings or resistance.  Later we find the "main course", that is, the coming to pass of the saving act, in this case the Crucifixion.  But there is still no crystal clear understanding until later on.  The "dessert" we may call those moments when Our Lord explains the significance of what has happened (as on the road to Emmaus), often rebuking the disciples for not having picked it up earlier.  "Why" He does all of this I'll leave to the divines.  But surely it must build up the faith and instill awe.  "That" He does so I take to be a truism, but if that is still at issue, then we have many examples at our command.

Consider the Christ’s conversation with Nicodemus where Our Lord states that He must be "lifted up" as "Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness" (Jn 3:14).  Here we have a clear reference to the Crucifixion, but there is no indication that Nicodemus understands it at the time.  So does that mean that Christ can't be speaking of the Crucifixion?  Of course not.  And it is likewise with John 6 and the Last Supper.  Our Lord also said to "Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up" (Jn 2:19), speaking of His Resurrection, but everyone thinks He's talking about maybe firebombing the place.  Only in retrospect is this teaching made clear.  And yet all admit that the verse, though misunderstood at the time, did indeed point forward to the Resurrection.  John the Baptist spoke of Christ as a "Lamb", pointing to His sacrificial mission.  And yet the disciples do not understand this mission at first.  Peter even gets called "Satan" in an attempt to deny it.  And what of the sign of Jonah?  Or Christ's subtle comparison to Solomon?  In all of these passages Christ meets with incomprehension, but the meanings are plainly admitted in retrospect.  In fact, the above examples are all far more abstruse and (seemingly) unlikely than the connection between John 6 and the Last Supper.  Perhaps the most glaring of all is Genesis 3:15: the prophecy of the Woman whose "seed" will crush the head of the serpent.  For thousands of years it lay buried in incomprehension.  It was only at Calvary, when Christ crushed the head of sin and death, that this was laid bear, giving birth to faith in millions.  Now if the paintings of van Gogh, or the music of Beethoven, can shatter us with awe at design born of genius, how much more should these designs of our Father, making "Heaven drowsy with the harmony"?  The bottom line, though, is that reference to a future event or established doctrine can indeed, and does (gloriously) happen.  As with the examples above.  As with John 6 and the Last Supper.  And to both of these St. Augustine gives assent.

Regarding the second part of your paper, "The passage seen in context", I must admit that I find my forehead getting damp and my collar getting tight whenever the living words of Christ are re-worked into a pedestrian idiom and then found (most fortunately) to be saying what the apologist had backed all along.  Thus I find that as regards Our Lord's promise to provide "bread from heaven", He is paraphrased as saying: "You think Moses provided you with the necessities of life?  He provided merely what's needed for physical life.  I will provide you with all that is needed for eternal life."  What Moses "provided", of course, was the heavenly manna - all's well on that score - but it's that word "merely" that is the hitch.  On the above view, the heavenly manna was only a kind of monolithic ration supply or Desert Emergency Kit.  Good for the belly, but what are crumbs and flour to the soul?  Nothing of course.  At least this is the view of the manna that we are presented with: "Moses' supply of "bread from heaven" meant that Moses provided that which was necessary to sustain physical life".  Period, in your tableau.  But in fact we see that the manna meant much more to the ancient Israelites, and this is key since it prefigures the Eucharist.  Thus to the Corinthians St. Paul spoke of the manna as "spiritual food" which (according to the Jerome Biblical Commentary)  is "spiritual" not merely because of its miraculous origin, but also because of its symbolic and prophetic nature in pointing to the Eucharist - the true spiritual food - to come.  Scripture also speaks of it as "bread from heaven" (Ps 78:24) and "food of angels" (Wis 16:20).  The manna is what later filled the Ark of the Covenant, and in the Apocalypse Christ promises "hidden manna" to those who persevere.  We shall not regard it, then, as mere bits of angel-baked dough.  A thing so religiously treasured which not only nourishes but prophetically intimates a divine reality to come can no more be considered "merely … for physical life" than baptism can be considered a kind of bubble bath for stiff joints.  More than that, the manna is a powerful symbol "written down for our instruction", mowing down the years with prophecy's scythe, subtly whetting spiritual appetites for a much rarer fare, the divine Eucharist to come.  But is all this only a fretter's cry of "wolf"?  I do not think so.  A tacit secularization of the manna acts like a "slippery slope", leading to a strict compartmentalization of man's physical and spiritual dimensions in partaking of the Eucharist, whereas, in fact, they are intertwined.  If you will forgive me for plugging my own stuff, I would refer you back to my treatment of the "flesh" and what it means in Bread from Heaven for clarification.

But the burden of all that manna talk, according to Protestant apologist Eric Svendson, is that "Jesus uses the analogy of bread … because that was what the crowd was interested in at that moment".  The picture painted is that Christ uses the relevant metaphor of eating and drinking to which His hearers will respond in order to drive home the fact that He must be eaten or drunk, that is, come to and believed in (as "personal Lord and Saviour" I presume?).  Thus in John 4 He speaks of "living water" to a thirsty woman, in John 6 He speaks of "living bread" to hungry men.  But on this interpretation the imagery of bread and water or what-not would be (in the Aristotelian sense) "accidental".  Christ would use as a symbol of Himself whatever item from the crockery or beverage at hand the crowds happened to be hankering for, but the symbol itself would be relative and nonessential.  (The swollen reed could be bruised; the smouldering wick could be quenched.)  And yet upon closer inspection, this argument of Svendson's that "Jesus uses the analogy of bread only because that was what the crowd was interested in" disproves the very claim he is trying to make.  Why?  Simply because Christ, after having achieved at least some success with the bread imagery (where the crowds say "Lord, give us this bread always" [Jn 6:34]), then switches the symbol to that which, most spectacularly, the crowds do not want.  There is a sudden change on the menu.  The "bread" they are to eat is no longer of whole wheat or unleavened persuasion.  Christ now identifies it with His own flesh and blood.  This is … what?  Astonishing?  Macabre?  Cannibalistic?  Mumbo-jumbo?  Mystical?  Divine?  It has been regarded as all of these at one time or another, and indeed, one hardly knows how to react.  To be told by someone to dine on their blood and guts and tissue and fat would drop jaws and peel eyelids in any culture or time, but to a first-century Jew, it was beyond all reckoning.  It was madness, taboo, death.   Mosaic Law solemnly forbade it, and punished any breaches with a fist of iron.  So my question is this: if (as Svendson states) "Jesus uses the analogy of bread only because that was what the crowd was interested in at that moment", then why doesn't He stick with bread?  Why does He add "flesh" and (even worse) "blood"?  The crowd is most certainly not interested in that.  In fact, the very thought of it creates such a frightful fuss in them, that the countless devotees who yesterday wanted to make Jesus King, now leave Him forever, even though this implies that they will lose eternal life.  And yet we are to believe that Christ was merely appealing to what they were "interested" in?  No, I am afraid not.  Clearly Christ had a more viable reason for all that flesh and blood talk, especially given that the only time the phrase "eat my flesh, drink my blood" was used in Jewish culture was as a formula of vengeance to be achieved by slander, backbiting, and bloodshed (see, for example: Micah 3:3, Ps 27:2, Is 9:18-20).  So let us not paint the phrase in an unduly rosy light.  Considered in itself, it would be a monstrous image for belief.  But how if Christ really meant that His flesh and blood were to be eaten?  On that peculiarity, the imagery would indeed be called for, as would His unusual use of the animal verb for "eat" (the Greek word trogo, lit. "to gnaw, to chew) when speaking of His flesh, a word which is never used figuratively in all of the Septuagint, the New Testament, or  ancient secular literature.  Given the Torah proscription and seeming cannibalistic connotations of "eat my flesh", the symbolism itself must have been essential, not accidental; or else it would have been savage and sacrilegious to use it.  But what possible reason could Christ have had to have so grossly offended, to have heaped such coals of fire on the heads of all (for even the Twelve were appalled by the symbolism) and to have spooked into the woodwork almost all of His supporters, than that the imagery of flesh and blood was essential precisely because it was real? as also the Last Supper shows?  The error of Christ's hearers came in thinking that they would "eat" Him the way a lion eats a zebra or a gourmand his beefsteak.  Earless to His subtle affirmations of true divinity, they missed the fact that He would give Himself by the power of the life-giving Spirit.

But perhaps the heart of the matter is much simpler than we have allowed.  Perhaps the obvious has wriggled out of our hands, like a slippery fish.  I mean of course that to scotch-tape onto the text of "Eat my flesh" the interpretation "Believe in me" when the passage itself is delivered not merely to the address of Everyman, but to believers, to very the apostles themselves, is to cut off the same branch on which one is sitting.  You are arguing here that  “flesh” refers to the need for men to come to and believe in Christ.  For Our Lord to be rebuffed by the flint of heart, then, though grievous, would not astound us.  But what are we to say when Christ's very disciples, the men who eat with Him at table, walk with Him in faith by day, curl near the fire with Him at night, heal the afflicted in His name, and look to Him as the hope of the world, refuse the invitation to believe in Him?  Does this not seem a trifle absurd; that those who by definition believe in Him would be aghast at the notion of believing in Him?  That the very soldiers keeping the faith would rebel when told of the need for faith?  We have lost our sense of proportion here.  For if, as you say, Christ simply meant by the flesh and blood that He is to be believed in, then why would those who do believe in Him call it a "hard saying", refuse to "listen" to it, and thereupon cease to believe in Him (Jn 6:66)?  The whole thing doesn’t make any sense.  If a King requested that his people enlist in the military, it would be no surprise if the stay-at-home citizenry chaffed at the summons, but surely his own militia would not snort and bridle over it.  They have enlisted already.  And it is the same with Christ's disciples.  And yet, they do leave.  Who will read us this riddle?  Mr. Koukl brings the following possible solution to the table: "Some did not believe and left.  Why?  Because they were not given to Jesus by the Father (v. 66).  Metaphoric statements for belief are meant to polarize the people and separate the sheep from the goats, just like parables."  The problem with such exegesis is that at no time was the flesh and blood interpreted by the disciples  as a metaphor for belief.  No savvy Biblicist or old Galilean seadog poked the man beside him and let out the secret: "Say, you hear all that stuff about flesh and blood.  What He really means is belief".  Instead the crowds grumble: "How can this man give us his flesh and blood to eat?" (v. 52).  Their interpretation is quite biological.  And not only the crowds, but (more importantly) the disciples encore the incredulity: "This is a hard saying" they mutter, right after Christ tells them that His flesh is true food and His blood true drink.  "Who can listen to it?" (v. 60).  But here we have a quandary.  Given that Christ consistently explained the hidden meaning of parables openly to His disciples (see Mt 13:36, Mk 4:34, Lk 8:9-10, Jn 11:11-14, 16:28-30), why would He not do so here, especially with things coming to such a pinch and eternal life weighing in the balances?  Any silence at this juncture would be fatal.  And I for one cannot really believe that our Lord would let His disciples depart for "Hades' damned lake" just because they were bad poets who had been hoodwinked by a metaphor.  All the evidence points to the contrary.  But even supposing that the disciples' apostasy, despite their role as believers, was due to the fact that they were asked to become believers: then why would they wait until John 6 to make a shipwreck of their faith?  After all, by this point John the Baptist and Jesus Himself have already spoken many times of the need to believe in the Son in order to receive eternal life (see Jn 3:18, 3:36, 5:38-40).  Why such tardy apostates then?  They had plenty of chances to make like a rabblement of lemmings before, so why have they been hugging the cliffs, clinging to faith in Christ? That they were believers is not in doubt, for quite apart from the fact that "someone who believes in so-and-so" is almost the definition of a disciple, Scripture plainly affirms their faith: "and his disciples believed in him" (Jn 2:11).  If their whole reason for leaving was that they were asked to believe, then surely they would have smelt the coffee earlier when saying after saying was piled up like mountain upon mountain to the effect that they were required to believe in Christ?  And yet they stayed, never once muttering: "These are hard sayings".  But even granting that those who hitherto had faith now made a shipwreck of it, it would be nonsense to suppose that it was the summons to faith that made them lose their own.  Let us not reduce the text - in the words of Bishop Sheen - to "retarded infantilism with diapers".

But following the disciples' apostasy, Christ turns to the Twelve (His last faithful bastion) and asks them, plaintively no doubt: "Will you also go away?"  Peter approaches the mic: "Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God" (v. 67-69).  We have all heard talk like this before.  It happens whenever the children see Daddy acting strangely but, though pensive and fidgety, they stand by him in filial obedience and love.  We see it when a man whose "mistress some rich anger shows" is left bewildered and blushing, but he stands by her nonetheless.  And it is the same with the Twelve.  The usually brash Peter seems tremulous.  Instead of belting out in answer: "Never would we leave you Lord!" he is uncharacteristically sheepish: "Lord, to whom shall we go?"  That is, there is no other game in town.  Because they believe in Christ's person (v. 69), they will accept His "hard saying" on this score.  The words are those of a lover, not a neophyte.  Your refrain has been that "eat my flesh, drink my blood" simply refer to the need for belief in Christ.  In fact we see here that whatever this mysterious teaching on eating the flesh and drinking the blood means, the apostles, though naturally disinclined to accept it, do so on Christ's authority, precisely because they believe in Him.  So not only do they not take "eat my flesh" to mean "Believe in me", they accept eating the flesh and drinking the blood because they already believe in Him.  Not to recognize this would be to mistake the effect for the cause, the tip for the root.  But Twelve were still unsmiling.  They did not yet know that they would receive Christ, not as mere carnal fare, but as the Lord of Glory.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

But what does the Pauline quill have to say about all of this?  What does St. Paul, the little ugly Jew of Tarsus “taken captive by God” teach about this theme?  As he wrote no Summa, we only have "patches of Godlight" here and there in the thicket of his letters to work with.  Perhaps most revealing are his instructions to the sheik and half-Gnostic Corinthians, to whom he wrote: "Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Cor 5:7).  His conclusion is not "Therefore let us heave a sigh of relief and wipe the sweat from our foreheads!"  No.  "Therefore let us keep the feast" (5:8).  Gums, teeth, and stomachs are still in order, as there is no feast without a meal.  And this should not surprise us.  After all, the Passover lamb of the Old Covenant had to be sacrificed, its blood shed, and then it had to be eaten (Ex 12:7).  Steps A and B were incomplete without step C.  The sacrifice was indeed salvific, but the lamb had to be eaten to restore full covenant communion.  Balk at it and the grim reaper could yet have his way with you.  (Indeed, in Egypt those who did not also eat the sacrificed lamb woke up with their eldest brother dead.)  Paul likewise sees the Passover lamb of the New Covenant as not only being a sacrifice and shedding of blood, but also as a partaking in Christ's own body: "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation (koinonia, lit. "communion") in the blood of Christ?  The bread which we break, is it not a participation (koinonia) in the body of Christ?" (10:16).  Cosmopolitan Corinth was to get a very different meal from the idol-fodder of Aphrodite.  It is this belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist which prompted Paul to say that "Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord … anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks damnation unto himself." (11:27, 29).  The passage is extremely telling, as the phrase "guilty of the body and blood" was a Hebrew circumlocution for "murder".  It was nothing less than the mark of Cain.  But if the Eucharist is only a symbol of Christ, then it would be nonsense to speak of abusing it as "murder".  If I hold up a picture of my enemy and shred it with a pen-knife, I may be guilty of madness, but not of murder.  And it is the same thing with the Eucharist.  That Paul is not merely being hyperbolic is clear from the fact that abuse of the Eucharist leads to "damnation" (v. 29), which is why (he tells the no doubt shuddering Corinthians) "many of you are weak and ill, and some have died" (v. 30).  I am afraid that with Paul, the Lord's supper was anything but a polite munching of Wonder Bread and Welch's grape juice at the local Baptist church.  For him it was nothing less than the mystical Passover at the heart of Christian life - or death - itself.  And I think that, though we tremble, we must agree.

Forgive me now for sounding like an ecclesiastical dinosaur or Lives of the Saints fanatic, but I must say that of all the eye-openers I came across in the stuff you sent me, it was the marshalling of St. Augustine to the horn and banner of Protestantism that really left me winded.  In that section you write: "Just as physical bread sustains physical life by physically eating it, so Jesus is the heavenly bread that sustains spiritual life by spiritually "eating" him (i.e., believing in him).  Physical food was no more in view here than physical life.  Augustine himself noted this when commenting on this passage:

"If the sentence is one of command, either forbidding a crime or vice, or enjoining an act of prudence or benevolence, it is not figurative.  If, however, it seems to enjoin a crime or vice, or to forbid an act of prudence or benevolence, it is figurative.  "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man," says Christ, "and drink His blood, ye have no life in you."  This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure, enjoining that we should share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us."  Your conclusion?  "Augustine's view of John 6 is identical to the Evangelical view.  To interpret is otherwise destroys the physical/spiritual contrast, reducing a life-giving, personal relationship to the mere consumption of food."  Astonishing!  The erstwhile Catholic bishop really a staunch Calvinist after all.  Hippo for Geneva, it seems.  We have lost our best man.  But before swimming back over the Tiber, let's take a closer look at what is being said here.  First of all, you cap off your Augustine citation by claiming that it is "identical to the Evangelical view".  But one Sunday afternoon's field trip to a half-dozen or so Evangelical Churches will quickly show that there is no such thing as a unified "Evangelical view" of John 6 or the Eucharist as such.  When Luther cried Sola Scriptura! he dropped the crystal chandelier of Church unity with a crash.  Post Wittenburg and Geneva, every man is his own Magisterium.  And indeed, ever since the days of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, Protestants have disagreed amongst themselves as to whether the Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is Real or merely symbolic.  Lutheran Evangelicals believe in the Real Presence.  As a Calvinist Evangelical your particular rubric excludes it.  Who is to be believed as representative, then, when the jury is hung and all claim Scripture alone as the Court of last appeal?

Also, according to your earlier comments, "what Jesus meant by "eating" and "drinking" him was to come to him and to believe in him".  This (we are to understand) is the "Evangelical view".  But where does St. Augustine (who is supposed to espouse the Evangelical view) equate "eating" and "drinking" Christ with believing in Him?  The very passage you cite lacks this wholly.  Instead, Augustine says that the "eating" and "drinking" refer to the need for us to "share in the sufferings of our Lord, and that we should retain a sweet and profitable memory of the fact that His flesh was wounded and crucified for us."  Nothing about "eat my flesh, drink my blood" as a formula for belief there.  Insofar as Augustine describes it as figurative, the imagery is about nailing ourselves to the gibbet with Christ, our minds teeming with Passion imagery.  So even if there were an "Evangelical view" as such, Augustine would not be subscribing to it.  But now let's deal with the passage itself.
The primary problem with the Augustine citation is that it is a very lone wolf.  It is always dangerous to cherry pick with the writings of a Father and turn this or that favoured passage into a creed without reference to the rest of his teachings.  That Augustine's theology of the Eucharist is filled to the brim with - well - blood, is only too well known.  Even the great Protestant scholar J.N.D. Kelly admitted this in his Early Christian Doctrines, stating that the "Eucharistic teaching" of Augustine and his peers "was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Saviour's body and blood".   But the line that supposedly executes a jiu-jitsu throw on Catholic doctrine comes from the pen of Augustine himself: "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man," says Christ, "an drink His blood, ye have no life in you."  This seems to enjoin a crime or a vice; it is therefore a figure (Figura ergo est)".  Checkmate, then?  Not upon closer inspection.  The whole problem with chalking this up as a symbolist passage (though even then it would not be the "Evangelical view", as we have already established) is that the word "figure" for Augustine meant something very different than what it means for us.  The Oxford Dictionary defines "a figure" as being something "metaphorical, not literal", but for Augustine and his teacher Ambrose, the terms figura (figure), sacra signa  (sacred sign), and sacramentum (sacrament) were often used interchangeably to denote the visible signs of sacred realities, actions, and gestures.  Thus Augustine wrote that: "Figures which pertain to divine things are called sacraments",  and "They are called sacraments because in them one thing is seen, another is understood.  That which is seen has a bodily appearance.  That which is understood has spiritual fruit".   According to Augustine, what is "seen" in the Eucharist is bread and wine, but what is "understood" is Christ's body and blood.  Thus in the passage you cited the good Doctor Gratia merely notes that when the Lord said to "eat my flesh", He did not mean to encourage cannibalism ("enjoin a crime or a vice") and make Hannibal Lectors of the pious Twelve.  (Can we not overhear St. Paul here crying: "God forbid!").  Rather, the "eating" refers to the "figure" or sacred sign or sacrament in which is contained the reality (the res) of the body and blood of Christ; the "food that eating does not diminish" (Conf., Bk. 10, 6.).  So we receive the stuff and substance of Christ crucified and risen (the first-born of all creation), but we do not become a pack of hyenas, and Christ does not sell His limbs to the local butcher.  That is the point of Augustine here.  We receive the body of Christ in a sacramental, not in an animalistic manner.  And to this, the "Faith of our Fathers", I hold.

But let us come to brass tacks.  To hold that St. Augustine taught a purely symbolic view of the Eucharist in this passage one would have to make a kind of theological schizophrenic of him.  I say this because in his corpus we find not merely one or two or ten, but nearly two dozen passages in which he pens a fullblooded theology of the Eucharist.  Thus to the newly baptized he says:
"I promised you who have been baptized, a sermon in which I would explain the sacrament of the Lord's Table … 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".

And in words that would make Aquinas seem a symbolist by comparison: "And he was carried in his own hands.  Now, brothers, who can understand how this can happen to a man?  Who can be carried in his own hands?  A man is able to be carried in the hands of others, but no one is carried in his own hands.  How this is to be understood in a literal way of David (1 Sam 21:13) himself we cannot discover; however, we can discover how this happened in the case of Christ.  For Christ was carried in his own hands when, entrusting to us his own Body, he said: "This is my Body."  Indeed he was carrying that Body in his own hands."
And again: "He took earth from earth, because flesh is from the earth, and he took Flesh of the flesh of Mary.  He walked on earth in that same Flesh, and gave that same Flesh to us to be eaten for our salvation.  Moreover no one eats that Flesh unless he has first adored it … and we sin by not adoring."  Here one might well ask: "if it is a sin to not adore that which must first be adored before it is eaten, then what on Earth must it be to refuse to eat the food that must be adored?"

Apart from this, to believe that Augustine held a purely symbolic view of the Eucharist, we would be obliged to hold that he came to theological fisticuffs with his revered father in the faith, St. Ambrose, the man who converted him and, holding to a realist teaching, wrote: "Although we see the appearance of bread and wine we should believe that, after the consecration, there is nothing other than the flesh of Christ and his blood."   And: "It is clear that the Virgin conceived beyond the order of nature.  And this (the Eucharist) that we effect is the Body that comes from the Virgin … indeed, it is the true Flesh of Christ that was crucified and buried: therefore truly this is the Sacrament of that Flesh.”

"And the rest" as Iago says in Othello "is silence".  Like a kidney transplant that refuses to take, Protestant teaching cannot succeed in grafting itself onto that of the early Church.  Augustine will not budge.  Ambrose will give no quarter.  And the whole holy phalanx of the City of God that went before them shouts rather than speaks the same reality of Christ's Body and Blood.  That Mr. Svendson and his colleagues still do not concede this is extremely revealing. If you have ever been in a tete-a-tete with someone whose attitude quickly made it clear (whether by shifting eyes or snap reply) that they did not really want to know your thoughts on a matter but merely wanted you to parrot their own opinions (you know, "Let me tell you what you think"), then I think you will know how St. Augustine and the Fathers would feel being told that they didn't really believe in the Eucharist.  One quick dip into the Church Fathers will show that Saints Ignatius, Irenaeus, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Augustine, Jerome and the others all shook their wise grey locks at any who refused to "discern the body of the Lord" in the Eucharist.  Here the Church Fathers almost contain the hyperbole: "More Catholic than the Pope".

In an article of his that you sent me Greg Koukl dismissed the Catholic interpretation of John 6 as "wooden literalism".  Struck by the tart irony of the claim, I read on and found that (sure enough) such an accusation was tantamount to the Protestant teapot calling the Catholic kettle black.  I say this because both of you argued that if the verse "unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (John 6:53) were referring to the Eucharist, then no Evangelical could have eternal life.  But since the Catholic Church teaches that other Christians can be saved, it must be guilty of doublethink (here is where the wood shavings creep in).  But the problem with this argument is that it interprets the above passage in a universal sense which admits of no exception, forgetting the fact that Jesus, as the rightful heir to the Old Testament prophets, often spoke of salvation in a  proverbial or hyperbolic manner peculiar to the Rabbis.  Thus He says that "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God" (Mk 10:25).  Strictly speaking, this is impossible.  A camel threaded by a needle would be a dead dromedary.  (And let us not have anything to do with a lower gate in Jerusalem being called the "eye of the needle".  That fiction was invented by the 19th c. German bourgeoisie to cure them of their scruples).  But after Christ poses this picturesque impossibility, the disciples, "greatly astonished", ask "Who then can be saved?" (v. 26).  Our Lord replies: "With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God" (v. 27).  And I take the statement of "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man" followed by the skull and bones in the same manner.  Both refer to a technical (and not to be minimized) impossibility to which God can make special exceptions.  If there were a book written on it, it would have to be called Surprised by Mercy.  And the point would be that though Hell is indeed a grim reality, "a dance with the devil in the pale moonlight", that grace which is fittingly called "amazing" can (in special circumstances) still save the unsalvageable, make Saint Pauls out of Sauls, and Mary Magdalens of demoniacs - raising Christian phoenixes from the dead ashes.  But ours is not to presume.  Ours is only to hope.  Hence our fervency in urging men to "observe the commandments", not the least of which is "Eat my flesh, drink my blood".
Consider also how unequivocal Christ is about the need for baptism, and yet there are exceptions to this as well.  "He who believes and is baptized will be saved" (Mk 16:16) He tells us, and "Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God" (Jn 3:5).  Peter joins his voice to the chorus, adding that: "Baptism now saves you" (1 Pet 3:21), and yet, despite all this, we know from the penitent thief crucified with Christ and taken by Him to Paradise, that somehow (mysteriously, providentially) there are cases where one can be saved without baptism.  So the idea of an exception being made to an essential means to salvation is not of itself unbiblical.  In the tenor of the Catechism: "God has bound salvation to the sacraments, but God himself is not bound by his sacraments".  The penitent thief now walks with Christ and eats of the Tree of life.  The rich man, despite his gold and moth-balls, might somehow still be saved.  And it is similar with the man who has not received the Eucharist.

But in noting that rare exceptions can be made to the necessity of the sacraments, I in no way mean to encourage abstinence from them.  That would be like saying
(in the words of St. Augustine) "Let so-and-so be wounded worse, for he is not dead yet".  Or, to put it in more homely fashion: if on a hike my companion and I reach the edge of a gorge and he says to me "It must be over a 100 ft. drop from here.  If you step off the edge of the cliff, you'll die" he is, strictly speaking, correct.  The natural result of stepping off would be a cadaver.  But that does not mean that extraordinary Providence could not spare me from otherwise certain death.  I might catch a branch sticking out (as actually happened to a friend of mine once), or my angel, in light of Psalm 91, might keep my feet from dashing the stones.  And it is the same with the dangers associated with the possession of mammon, the lack of baptism, and lack of the Eucharist - all of which normally spell disaster.  To hoard riches is to step off a cliff.  To not be baptized is to step off a cliff.  To refuse to eat the Eucharist is to step off a cliff.  And while a branch (inculpable ignorance) or an angel (incorporation into Christ by extraordinary means) might save me from the rocks below, all jumping off of cliffs is emphatically to be avoided.  Those who play with loaded dice usually lose.

But if all this sounds too mercenary, as if the gifts of God were only to be esteemed for their survival value, then please forgive me.  Nothing irks me more than the spiritual survivalist mindset which forgets that salvation is not merely from damnation, but for beatitude.  The things that make survival worth having are not to be rated below the things which make it possible.  "The reason for loving God" St. Bernard tells us, "is God Himself, and the measure for loving Him is love immeasurable".  Rather the Good Shepherd than the hireling.  Rather the Prodigal son than the slave.  We run to Paradise not simply to escape Hell, but to find Our Father Who says "My son, give me thy heart".  And yet, the fact that love is a union of wills implies that we must, out of love for Christ, accept the means to union with Him which He Himself has commanded (baptism, the Eucharist).  That is why it is not enough to simply "accept Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Saviour".  We must accept Christ as Lord and Saviour on His own terms.  If we fail to do this, we remain Captain on deck.  But if we rise to the occasion, then, as in the story of the boy who finds the Sun in a Box or the shepherds who find God in a Cave, we also find something - the Lord's body and blood - which is too good to be true.  With the delicious exception that it is true.

Elsewhere you state that "Another example of this kind of metaphor (using food or drink as a symbol for belief) is found in John 4, where Jesus meets the woman at the well … In both cases a metaphor of consumption is used to illustrate belief in Jesus.  In both cases the audience mistakenly take the metaphor literally."  I was surprised that you didn't trot out the whole rigmarole about Christ calling Himself a door (Jn 10:7,9), a vine (Jn 15:1), and a hen (Lk 13:34); ergo, for the Catholic to be consistent in believing Christ's "flesh" to be literal, he must also believe that Christ is transubstantiated into doors, plants, and chickens!  But the logic behind the above argument (which Mr. Koukl so eloquently makes), and your own appeal to John 4, is largely the same.  And with sportsmanlike admiration (like Wile E. Coyote and Sam the Sheepdog at the end of a hard day), I have often seen the Protestant apologist who sets himself up as Devil's Advocate save this argument as "the Devil's last laugh".  What it fails to take into account, though, is that golden thread without which the pearls of Scripture are scattered: context.  Christ speaks of Himself as a Door because He is the entranceway to eternal life.  But at the Last Supper He does not hold up a doorknob and say: "This is my body".  He spoke of Himself as a vine because we are one body in Him and we receive His grace as spiritual sap.  But not once did He hold up a vine, proclaiming "This is my blood of the New Covenant".  Yet He did just that with the bread and the wine which He foretold in John 6 would become His Body and Blood.  There He states (as if to preempt this very objection and settle all doubt) "My flesh is true food, my blood is true drink".  But never do we hear the radically preposterous "My flesh is true wood, my blood is true chicken".  To believe that Christ is literally a door, a vine, or a hen, would be like believing (in the words of C.S. Lewis) "that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs".  But the language of John 6 on Christ's Body and Blood is light years removed.  There one gets the impression that while the crowds considered the theme to be a dead horse, Christ insisted on beating it so hard that it came back to life again.

But the whole business you raise about the "living water" of John 4 is a little different.  There you suggest that it is used "to illustrate belief in Jesus".  But in fact we see that far from being a simple metaphor for belief in Christ, "living water" is used to symbolize the Holy Spirit welling up from within those who already believe.  So here too the belief is the father of the effect.  This is illustrated for us in numerous passages, most notably in John 7: "Jesus stood up and exclaimed, "Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as Scripture says: "Rivers of living water will flow from within him."  He said this in reference to the Spirit that those who came to believe in him were yet to receive." (v. 37-39).  Note that the "living water" refers to the Holy Spirit given by virtue of belief in Christ.  It would be twisting the imagery into a pretzel, then, to hold that it referred to the very thing upon which it was predicated.  You ask: "why does the Catholic Church not teach that we must drink physical water to gain eternal life per John 4?"  Simply because the "water" alludes to the Holy Spirit Who is by definition immaterial and therefore cannot be literally drunk.  The "flesh" of John 6, however, alludes to the body of Christ which is by definition quite physical (unless we are to believe the Incarnation a hoax) and therefore can be literally consumed.  But note once again how Christ uses the animal verb for "eat" in John 6 to clarify this.  We are to "gnaw" or "chew" His flesh.  Whatever this is then (and the Jews thought it madness), it is not the language of metaphor.  By contrast, Jesus does not use the animal verb for "drink" in John 4.  He does not say that we are to "slurp up" or "slobber" the waters of eternal life.  In fact, in the same verse (4:14) He clarifies by stating that they will well up from within.

But your last argument is perhaps your most appealing.  In it, even the most "Romish" of us can hear something like the cuckoo's voice or the siren's song - a call to an eternity long longed for, of "ethereal seas, horizons infinite".  It is the elementary proposition (into which the seraphim long to look) that one drop of Christ's blood has more power in it than a billion bursting suns.  It is the faith that when Christ hung under the murderous heat of the Israeli Sun during that first and best of Good Fridays; that the act was sufficient, even superabundant (like David's "cup running over") to atone for the sin of the race, make peace between God and man, and open up Heaven to the saints.  Most important of all, it need not be repeated like the sacrifices of the Old Covenant.  God's dying could have atoned for a thousand Universes all asphyxiated with sin.  There is to be no talk, then, of Christ's work needing something "added" to it, or any madness about "re-sacrificing" Him.  What He did, He did (as the writer of Hebrews put it) ephapax, "once for all".

So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then.

He hates him
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer.

Lastly, as an old teacher of mine once said that "A man convinced against his will remains unconvinced", I am not unduly naïve about the effectiveness of arguments left in vacuo.  By themselves, they often militate rather than illumine.  It is the whole world of ideas which presupposes one’s arguments that usually pulls the puppet strings.  It is with a view to this, then, that I return to an earlier statement of yours that I believe to be the lynchpin of the whole Evangelical mindset.  After writing that "Augustine's view of John 6 is identical to the Evangelical view", you conclude "To interpret it otherwise destroys the physical/spiritual contrast, reducing a life-giving, personal relationship to the mere consumption of food."  Am I wrong in believing this to be what Evangelicals might call “Our America, our New-found-land”?  The manner of touching the divine which (by its nature) will exclude the things of touch?  I am not de-throning sola sciptura or sola fide here, but they are “merely” Protestant, not specifically Evangelical; not myopic about a “personal relationship with Jesus” that is seen as purely interior.  So here, then, is what the very Augustine whom you cite as your authority has to say about this personal vs. sacramental dichotomy:

"There are some who think that, though these visible sacrifices may be suitable for other gods, for the God who is invisible, greater and better, only invisible, greater and better sacrifices, such as the offering of a pure mind and upright will, are appropriate.  Such people are evidently ignorant of the fact that these visible sacrifices are mere symbols of invisible sacrifice just as truly as audible words are mere signs of realities.  For example, when we direct our prayers and praise to Him, we use words which have meaning and, at the same time, we offer in our hearts the things that our words signify.  So, too, when we offer sacrifice, we know that visible sacrifice should be offered to no one but Him to whom we ourselves, in our hearts, should be the invisible sacrifice."

He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; not the God of the Platonists, the Gnostics, and the Manicheans.  Man in relation to his body is not an angel in an animal or a ghost in a machine.  One look into a child's face or lover's eyes quickly makes sawdust of the opinion that the body muffles the soul rather than expresses it.  In biblical thought, man in his body is more like a knight upon his charger.  Bristling, pawing, and neighing, it is an extension of his very self.  But if such a physical/spiritual contrast as you propose were to be maintained, it would quickly make nonsense of such episodes as when Elisha's bones (2 Kings 13:21), Paul's hankerchief (Acts 19:11-12), and spittle or mud applied to men's eyes by Christ (Jn 9:6) were all used in the divine healing process.  Worse still: it would mean that Christ's precious blood, because it is physical, could not be used to wash away men's sins, which are spiritual.  But no one would maintain that Christ's bodily sacrifice on the Cross was not also a spiritual act.  (In our actions it is not either body or spirit that are working any more than it is either this blade or that one in a pair of scissors that are cutting.  Both are uniquely fitted, intersect, and intertwine).  And it is the same with the sacraments.  In baptism, a simple sinner's prayer is not enough.  Christ also commands that physical water be used.  In the healing of the sick, James is not content with Our Fathers alone.  He also calls for the elders to anoint the sick with oil (Jas 5:14).  And it is likewise with the Eucharist.  Christ commands not mere pious reflection or tearful eulogies about His saving work ("Do this in memory of me"); He also populates the event with true food and true drink.  And why not given that man, as even the ancient Greeks knew, is the rationale animale.  The one being who combines both the spiritual and the animal in one indivisible person.  C.S. Lewis (the "Aquinas, the Augustine, and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism” according to J.I. Packer) was a firm believer in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.  He pegged this exact theme when he wrote (no doubt pipe in teeth): "More than that, the most completely animal and self-regarding of all our appetites has been chosen to become the vehicle of our most strictly commanded communion with God: "Eat this, drink this".  It looks as if God, or God's plans for our Redemption were not in the common sense of the word half so "spiritual" as the higher paganism supposed.  He seems to descend deepest into nature when He intends to lift us highest.  Blood and guts and glands and genes and things of that sort don't repel Him.  Negative spirituality, departure from the animal and instinctive, doesn't of itself seem to please Him particularly."   Our God is the glad Creator and our body is the steed of our soul.  Let us therefore bless matter, and have whatever nothing to do with the pagan nonsense which sees spirit and body as being like water and oil: alien and unfriendly bodies mutually opposed.  A few minutes dip in the Creation account will show that just the opposite is true; that spirit and body are things "made for each other" (in the common phrase of lovers), that they are hand and glove, lock and key, seal and wax.  For I am sure - I feel it in my bones - that if we could get rid of the pseudo-Manicheanism which says that spirit is spirit and matter is matter and never the twain shall meet, that we will have advanced light years in this dispute and helped Evangelicals want rather than wince at sacramental communion with Christ.  "In the ecclesiastical hearth" Peter Kreeft writes, "the sacramental fire is burning".  Why not come in and warm up?

With deep regard and many prayers for you and yours,

God bless you richly.

David Elliot,
September 9, 2002.

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