Have Anglicans gone Lutheran on Lord's Supper?

Stalwart · May 5, 2022

Invictus said: ↑

Pope St. Leo the Great, Letter 28 ("The Tome")
But after the Lord's resurrection (which, of course, was of His true body, because He was raised the same as He had died and been buried), what else was effected by the forty days' delay than the cleansing of our faith's purity from all darkness? For to that end He talked with His disciples, and dwelt and ate with them, He allowed Himself to be handled with diligent and curious touch by those who were affected by doubt, He entered when the doors were shut upon the Apostles, and by His breathing upon them gave them the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), and bestowing on them the light of understanding, opened the secrets of the Holy Scriptures. (Luke 24:27) So again He showed the wound in His side, the marks of the nails, and all the signs of His quite recent suffering, saying, See My hands and feet, that it is I. Handle Me and see that a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see Me have ; in order that the properties of His Divine and human nature might be acknowledged to remain still inseparable: and that we might know the Word not to be different from the flesh, in such a sense as also to confess that the one Son of God is both the Word and flesh. Of this mystery of the faith your opponent Eutyches must be reckoned to have but little sense if he has recognized our nature in the Only-begotten of God neither through the humiliation of His having to die, nor through the glory of His rising again. Nor has he any fear of the blessed apostle and evangelist John's declaration when he says, every spirit which confesses Jesus Christ to have come in the flesh, is of God: and every spirit which destroys Jesus is not of God, and this is Antichrist. But what is to destroy Jesus, except to take away the human nature from Him, and to render void the mystery, by which alone we were saved, by the most barefaced fictions. The truth is that being in darkness about the nature of Christ's body, he must also be befooled by the same blindness in the matter of His sufferings. For if he does not think the cross of the Lord fictitious, and does not doubt that the punishment He underwent to save the world is likewise true, let him acknowledge the flesh of Him whose death he already believes: and let him not disbelieve Him man with a body like ours, since he acknowledges Him to have been able to suffer.
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This does not contradict what we're saying that Jesus now has a heavenly body. Obviously it's still a human body but it's a heavenly human body. It is not like what he had before his resurrection.

Pope St. Gregory the Great, Magna Moralia
For in that God is a Trinity, the Holy Trinity, i.e. the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, raised up to life the extinct Flesh of the Only-Begotten Son.
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Yes. Are you saying this somehow disproves the view that Jesus now has a heavenly body?

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIIa, Q. 54, art. 3, resp.
Christ's body in the Resurrection was "of the same nature, but differed in glory." Accordingly, whatever goes with the nature of a human body, was entirely in the body of Christ when He rose again. Now it is clear that flesh, bones, blood, and other such things, are of the very nature of the human body. Consequently, all these things were in Christ's body when He rose again; and this also integrally, without any diminution; otherwise it would not have been a complete resurrection, if whatever was lost by death had not been restored. Hence our Lord assured His faithful ones by saying (Matthew 10:30): "The very hairs of your head are all numbered": and (Luke 21:18): "A hair of your head shall not perish."

But to say that Christ's body had neither flesh, nor bones, nor the other natural parts of a human body, belongs to the error of Eutyches, Bishop of Constantinople, who maintained that "our body in that glory of the resurrection will be impalpable, and more subtle than wind and air.

Obj. 1 and Reply

Obj.: It would seem that Christ's body did not rise entire. For flesh and blood belong to the integrity of the body: whereas Christ seems not to have had both, for it is written (1 Corinthians 15:50): "Flesh and blood can not possess the kingdom of God." But Christ rose in the glory of the kingdom of God. Therefore it seems that He did not have flesh and blood.
Reply: Flesh and blood are not to be taken there for the nature of flesh and blood, but, either for the guilt of flesh and blood, as Gregory says [St. Gregory, Moral. in Job 14:56, or else for the corruption of flesh and blood: because, as Augustine says (Ad Consent., De Resur. Carn.), "there will be neither corruption there, nor mortality of flesh and blood." Therefore flesh according to its substance possesses the kingdom of God, according to Luke 24:39: "A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as you see Me to have." But flesh, if understood as to its corruption, will not possess it; hence it is straightway added in the words of the Apostle: "Neither shall corruption possess incorruption."
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Quoting from a pro-transubstantialist. Cool, cool.

Martin Luther, Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15
If someone were to say in view of St. Paul's declaration that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," that only the soul, or the spirit, and not the body will arise, as a number of heretics concluded, he is directly contradicting St. Paul's doctrine throughout this whole chapter...And what could be clearer than St. Paul's words, which state that flesh and blood, which is sinful now, cannot come into heaven?
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Doesn't contradict us even for a second.

Anthony Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (The New International Greek Testament Commentary)
The LXX regularly uses flesh and blood to denote humankind in its weakness and vulnerability, and in this sense Paul declares elsewhere that his revelation of gospel truth comes not from "flesh and blood" but from God...Apocalyptic emphasizes "a radical incompatibility between the present condition of human existence and the resurrected condition...Transformation is necessary." Indeed so, but this entails not only transformation from weakness to power (vv. 43-44) but also new creation in terms of deliverance from sin to a disposition of holiness. It is an axiom of Jewish-Christian theology that only the pure and holy can rest in the immediate presence of God. Hence Jeremias is correct to detect a parallelism that is more than merely synonymous between v. 50a and v. 50b. Each part takes up (in inverse order) the two aspects of the change described in vv. 43-44. A [soma] constituted by the presence and direction of the Holy Spirit entails: (i) holiness in place of sin (v. 50a); and (ii) the reversal of weakness, degeneration, and decay (v. 50b).
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Again doesn't contradict us even for a bit. Are you saying that I wouldn't assert that Jesus now, in his resurrected state, has flesh and blood? Of course I would, every minute of every hour. But the question is, what kind of flesh and blood does he have? This your quotes do not address (except from Aquinas, who is for transubstantiation and therefore irrelevant).

1 Cor. 15:50 does not negate the assertion that Jesus' body post-resurrection continued to be constituted of "flesh and blood", as the Gospels' resurrection accounts make clear.
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Yes of course it is flesh and blood. But it is heavenly flesh and blood. It is not fleshy flesh and blood. It is not mortal flesh and blood. It is supernatural flesh and blood, not natural flesh and blood. As St. Paul says:

Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; 2 And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; 3 And did all eat the same spiritual meat; 4 And did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.
— 1 Corinthians 10:1 (KJV)

You might benefit from this article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_body

Spiritual body
In Christianity, the apostle Paul introduced the concept of the spiritual body (Koine Greek: sōma pneumatikos) in the New Testament (1 Corinthians 15:44), describing the resurrection body as "spiritual" (pneumatikos) in contrast to the natural (psychikos) body:

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.
— 1 Corinthians 15:42-44, NIV

Christian teaching traditionally interprets Paul as comparing the resurrection body with the mortal body, saying that it will be a different kind of body; a "spiritual body", meaning an immortal body, or incorruptible body (15:53—54).

Rexlion · May 5, 2022

I agree with Stalwart that whatever "flesh" Jesus now has, it's not the same type we have. Our flesh is made of cells that die off and get replaced, that require constant nourishment, and that eventually will rot & decay. Jesus' eternal flesh is not bound by entropy, it needs no cellular energy or oxygen, it produces no waste products, and it will never decay.

We will be given bodies like His, too. And when we eat and drink (for pleasure, since we won't need that sort of sustenance), I doubt there will be any byproducts to expel; in the new heavens & earth there will be new physical laws at work, and I think the ingested materials will simply disappear from within us.

If I'm wrong, I'll be sure to drop by the houses of @Invictus and @Stalwart to take a dump in each of their bathrooms, and admit I was mistaken.

I mean, would heaven really be heaven if we still have to clean up dog piles on our front lawns?

Rexlion · May 5, 2022

1Co 15:52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
1Co 15:53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.

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Have Anglicans gone Lutheran on Lord's Supper?

Stalwart Well-Known Member Anglican

Rexlion Well-Known Member

Rexlion Well-Known Member