The Eucharist and the Protestants: A Fundamental Fumbling

The inability of our Protestant brethren in understanding the Eucharist comes from being unable to take one of the core fundamentals of the Christian faith in every aspect of the Biblical narrative. And that fundamental is that man is body and soul.

This deceptively simple state hides in itself a key to understanding everything Christ is trying to accomplish in the Gospels.

Of course, if one asks our brothers if they believe it, of course, they shall answer in the affirmative. And they are not lying or being hypocritical when they do. As I said before, they are unable to take this theological statement in every aspect of the Biblical narrative. It is how a leftist would adhere to people having a right to life until you ask them if abortion harms this right regarding the baby.

Of course, I am not trying to insult Protestants by comparing them to abortionists, and I am aware of the fact that there are leftists who speak against the murder of infants, I am just making a point of how one can lose sight of their own long-held truth.

Somewhere down the line, a very eastern, religious understanding of the body and soul began entering Protestant thinking. The body was made subservient to the soul, mere containers of our 'higher-selves', our souls.

The most troublesome and frustrating place this thinking entered was the conversation of the Eucharist. Due to this, protestants became baffled, scandalized, and repulsed by the thought of consuming the body of Christ just like the sixty or so disciples who left Christ when He gave the Bread of Life discourse (although they were scandalized through the perspective of Jewish law).

But my belief is that if Protestants keep the fundamental I mentioned man is body and soul front and center before their eyes, they would not have been perturbed by it at all. Confused about how it works maybe but not horrified surely.

Let me ease into the reasoning by bringing up the Passion. If the soul was the end all be all, the narrative of the Passion would not make sense. Why didn't Christ only suffer spiritual agony? Why did he have to go through the torture of flogging, beating, humiliation, and crucifixion? Cause not just the spirit, but the body too needed to be reclaimed. It needed to be resurrected for man is both body and soul. The body is not something that can be cast away when you have to leave the earthly realm and be forgotten. No, the body needs to be brought to glory as well. The body is not a container, it is the animation of the soul.

And body must be nourished. It must eat right or it will fall apart. If our bodies fell by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, it must rise by eating of the Tree of Life, Christ Himself.

And all of this is derived from that faithful moment on the sixth day of creation that echoes throughout the Biblical narrative.

A few examples:

• Sacrifices are of physical things done with spiritual faith
• Samson loses his strength when the Holy Spirit departs from him which coincides with the physical cutting of his hair
• Circumcision is of the flesh and of the heart
• Baptism is of the water and of the spirit

Man is body and spirit (you must be annoyed by me repeating it over and over again but it is necessary) is necessary to understand the Eucharist and as I showed, even the Crucifixion, which by the way, if you ask the Jews and the Muslims, is infinitely more baffling, scandalizing, and repulsive that the Eucharist cause while you adhere to the fundamental regarding the Resurrection, they don't.