Prayer Wednesday: Protestant MegaChurch Guy Discovers the Real Presence

Last updated on: March 18, 2020 at 12:01 am by Mark Shea

Prayer Wednesday: Protestant MegaChurch Guy Discovers the Real Presence 2020-01-24T19:35:52-07:00 Mark Shea

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

It’s always enjoyable to watch a good-hearted person start to discover the historical Church and what it actually believed and taught. The realization that you’ve got the story almost exactly backwards can be a jolt, but it can also liberating, like a bone popping back into its socket and feeling right for the first time in a long time.

The narrative I absorbed as an Evangelical was that Jesus had obviously instituted the Eucharist as a mere memorial: an audio-visual aid for people who needed that kind of thing to remind them of his sacrifice. It was never made particularly clear why a ritual meal of bread and wine would remind us of a brutal crucifixion, but it never occurred to me to ask. The notion that the Eucharist was the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ himself, fully present under the appearance of bread and wine was clearly a Dark Ages corruption that only a bunch of superstitious peasants who had never heard of Bible could possibly believe.

This was, in part, because the particular sect I came from had taken the next logical step away from the historic Christian tradition and dropped communion altogether. Once you accept the premise that it’s just an audio-visual aid for people who need that kind of thing, it’s not terribly hard to conclude that “spiritually mature” people don’t need such things any more than they need sacrificial rites of the Temple liturgy. I, being a new Christian had never having given any of this stuff one second’s thought when I joined this little sect. (It was the group of Christians on my dorm floor and I turned to them–not without reason–as the only people in my social circle who knew anything about this Jesus I had encountered.)

As it happened, they were charismatics who came out of a non-denominational Pentecostal tradition. They had absorbed what I would later learn was a sort of gnostic theology that tended, in a half-baked way, to pit the spiritual against the physical. In such a theology, the physical–and the human–tended to be seen as the thing to be escaped. Jesus, in their belief, was raised from the dead bodily only to show us he was still alive. When he ascended, he abandoned his humanity and dissolved back into pure spirit. The only Second Coming was Pentecost, when he returned in spiritual form. They still believed in the Trinity in some sense, but as I look back, it was a kind of quasi-modalism. In other words, they distinguished between the Father and the Son, but the Holy Spirit was just Jesus returning in spiritual form.

A consequence of all this was the rejection not only of sacraments (common to a number of Protestantisms) but the rejection of even the modified grape juice and cracker “symbolic” communion of much of Protestantism and even of baptism. True baptism was baptism in the Holy Spirit. True communion was when the Spirit in me communes with the Spirit in you and so forth. This was unusual in Protestantism, but not unheard of. And I had no clue it was remote from anything in the early Church, because what did I know?

The psychological impact on a damaged person like me would take years to be felt, but its effects eventually did manifest. For somebody like me, with a strained relationship with his father and deeply insecure about his relationship with God the Father, the message, “Your humanity is bad. You need to die and be replaced by God’s Son” was a particularly toxic parody of the gospel. Eventually I reached a crisis point and, at just the time I needed to hear it, I was exposed to actual Catholic theology, which insists that God blesses our humanity, not tries to destroy it and that “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”

All of a sudden Mary made sense because she was not a competitor to Jesus but his finest work of art and happiest saint. Above all, the Incarnation (and its corollary, the Resurrection and the Real Presence in the Eucharist) snapped into focus as God coming to us through, not in spite of, our humanity. Everything became sacramental. My humanity was blessed, not an obstacle. I was a beloved son, not somebody who needed to disappear. It answered my deepest instincts about why I loved creation so much and why I could not buy the idea that I had to choose between it and God. As long as I did not love creatures more than God (the essence of idolatry and the source of endless frustration) I could thank God for creatures and not place on them the intolerable burden of expecting them to satisfy something in me that only God could satisfy.

What I realized, like the guy in the video, was that the Real Presence was not some Dark Ages corruption of what Jesus “originally” taught, but was simply what Jesus and the apostles taught the Church and what the Church routinely taught ever since. The first suggestions that the Eucharist was “just a symbol” and not the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus don’t turn up in the historical record for nearly a thousand years. A full blown denial of the Real Presence as the accepted doctrine of a body of Christians doesn’t happen till the Reformation, with Zwingli. And even other Protestants regarded that as nuts. Luther held something much closer to a Catholic view of the Eucharist than to Zwingli’s. I was shocked (but also immediately convinced) when I discovered that it was we Evangelicals, not the “Dark Age Catholics” who had changed apostolic and biblical teaching. And that was only reinforced when I realized that every apostolic communion whether or not it was in union with Rome believed the same.

I pray this guy follows the evidence he is discovering and comes to the table of the Eucharist. God bless him.

On this Prayer Wednesday, please pray for him and for all who are following the Light toward Jesus Christ, fully present in the Eucharist.

Previous Post

March 16, 2020

Almsgiving Monday: An Argument About the Old "What About Putting Vets, Not Refugees, First?" Lie

Next Post

March 20, 2020 Fasting Friday: The Spirit and the Letter

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 September 2006 June 2006 July 2005 April 2005 May 2002 April 2002 0000

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz