Transubstantiation and Jon 6.

I am not a huge fan of posting link to other blog articles. I guess if you wanted to read other blogs, you would go to them on your own and read them. However, I opened up my RSS reader this morning and found a really good article on Transubstantiation and John 6 on one of the blogs I subscribe to, Parchment and Pen. This blog is in the broad stream of Evangelicalism and often has good articles. This particular article about the Roman Catholic understanding of John 6 and Transubstantiation had a very good exegetical feel to it (I think that is the main reason I liked it as much as I did). One of the points that I thought was most interesting was this excerpt, mainly because I never point this point together in my own mind.

Another important factor that Keating and other Catholic apologists fail to take into account is that John does not even record the central events of the Last Supper at all Obviously if we took the Catholic interpretation of John 6 and believed John included this passage to communicate that believers must eat the literal body and blood of Christ in order to have eternal life, you would expect John to have recorded the events that it foreshadows. You would expect John to have a historical record of the Last Supper, the inaugurating meal of the Eucharist. But John does not. What an oversight by John! In fact, John is the only Gospel writer that did not record the Last Supper. Therefore, it is very unlikely that in John’s mind, a literal eating and drinking of Christ body and blood are essential for salvation. Remember John wrote the only book in the NT that explicitly says it is written for the purpose of salvation and he does not even include the Lord’s Supper.