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Drawing on his newest book — The Early Church Was the Catholic Church — Joe Heschmeyer describes what the very earliest Christians believed was happening in the celebration of the Eucharist. Did they see it as a sacrifice or just a memorial? Did they understand it as a sign or as the real presence of Jesus?
Cy Kellett:
Did the very earliest Christians think about the Eucharist like we do? Joe Heschmeyer is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. Happy New Year to you and to all of yours. We’re glad to be with you in the new year. If you found us on YouTube, we’re super happy you found us on YouTube. And if you haven’t found us on YouTube yet, go over there and look for Catholic Answers Focus and subscribe because we have our own YouTube channel now. We just started that last month, and we’d like to build up our subscriber pool over there on the YouTube page.
Cy Kellett:
This week, we talk a bit about the Eucharist and one of the enduring myths of Christian history is the myth that there’s some kind of a kernel that out of that kernel develops and grows a Church that really almost in a certain sense has forgotten the kernel. You’ll get the person, the scholar who will say, “Jesus was some kind of itinerant Jewish preacher. We don’t really know that much about him. There’s a few things here and there we might be able to say with certainty about him, but all of this stuff just grew up after him.” Thus, we deny the Lordship of Jesus and the fact that Jesus really said the things that he says in the gospels and really meant the thing that he says in the gospels.
Cy Kellett:
Another way of having this… The seed was different than the plant kind of mentality is to say, “Well, we have the clear teaching of Jesus and we have those in the gospel, but the Church that grew up after the time of the apostles, it elaborated on these things in ways that really were in a certain sense, I suppose, disloyal or dishonest about or to the person of Jesus and the early Christian Church.” Well, that’s also not true. The fact is that the plant that grew, the Catholic church, comes directly from the seed that is planted in Jesus and is nurtured by the apostolic ministry. It’s the same Church.
Cy Kellett:
So, Joe Heschmeyer has this lovely book, the Early Church Was the Catholic Church, that helps to make that point. I think the more people come to understand this, the less they are tempted to things like modern Protestantism or Mormonism or other more modern Christian or Christian-like undertakings, certainly would be less tempted to syncretism and all that. So we just decided, we’d ask Joe about the Eucharist. Well, we have this elaborate theology of the Eucharist. Did they really have that in the early church? Did they really know the things that we claim to know and say the things that we claim might are true about the Eucharist? Here’s what Joe Heschmeyer had to say: Joe Heschmeyer, Catholic Answers apologist. Thanks for being with us.
Joe Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
I’ve been reading a really nice book. It’s called The Early Church Was the Catholic Church, the Catholic witness of the fathers in Christianity’s first two centuries. And so, thanks for writing it, Joe Heschmeyer.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s my pleasure. It was a real joy to get to write.
Cy Kellett:
It gives us a nice chance too, to do some interviews with you about the early church. And, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to ask you about the early Church again today.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I’m happy to have that be a happy byproduct of having written the book.
Cy Kellett:
I’m glad it’s a happy byproduct, not, “Oh, it’s them again.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
If I didn’t want to talk about the Church fathers, I’d made a very poor choice writing a book about them.
Cy Kellett:
So, here’s my dilemma or the objection, I suppose I want to start with, which I hear sometimes. Which is, Eucharistic theology like Christology… And I would say, this is what the person is saying. This is not what I’m saying. “Like Christology, Eucharistic theology is a thing that develops over time, such that the high Eucharistic theology that you might get in later centuries, doesn’t really reflect what the earliest Church believed about the Eucharist. That, it was a much less formed belief, and it was more memorial than sacrifice and all that.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, that’s a common view. The really striking thing about it is just how little evidence there is for it. Meaning, the earliest writings we have are consistent with Catholic theology and often so explicitly Catholic that a Protestant couldn’t affirm them without treating them as not saying what they’re literally saying. That you have to really say, “Well, maybe they didn’t mean it the way it sounds over and over and over and over and over again,” when you’re reading the church fathers. And say, “Yeah, I mean, maybe they didn’t mean that. It’s not what I would say, but maybe there’s a way to interpret that consistent with Protestant theology.” And, you can do that for like one or two quotations. And, I understand that. There are times where people say something that out of context looks kind of bad or looks, different than what you would affirm, but you want to read them in a way that’s harmonious. I understand all of that.
Joe Heschmeyer:
But when it comes to this, the Church fathers are so univocally Catholic. They are speaking with one voice in this very Catholic way. And, we don’t find a major Eucharistic controversy in the way we would expect. We don’t find… There’s a whole branch of Protestant theology and apologetics that claims either what you just said. Originally, it was a memorialist view and then, it gradually becomes this literal kind of Sacramentarian view. That is so historically unfounded that a lot of Protestants have moved away from it. And so, you’ll instead find people saying, “Well, some of the early Christians clearly held something like a Catholic view of the Eucharist, but maybe these other ones who are less explicit actually held something more like a symbolic view of the Eucharist.” And, what’s striking about that is that these two sides never seem to argue. In fact, you’ll often find one writer who’s writings one day appear to be symbolic and one day appear to be sacramental. And the reason is because sacraments are signs.
Joe Heschmeyer:
The Catholic side says, “Well, of course they’re going to say some symbolic sounding things.” They’re explaining the sign value of the sacrament because sacraments are, we would say, efficacious signs. They’re signs that do something. And so, both halves of that are true. That one day you may preach on the efficaciousness and one day you may treat the sign value. There’s no contradiction there. That’s two halves of the same coin. From the Protestant perspective, you often see people imagining these are two separate camps. But the remarkable thing, again, is that these two camps somehow never fight. They never write against each other. They don’t seem to be aware of the other one’s existence, which should be a red flag that, that’s a misreading of the evidence.
Cy Kellett:
So would it be fair to say then, that if I were trying to locate the sacramental view of the Eucharistic celebration, who first proposed this? Because, I can imagine someone saying, “Well, maybe even the apostles got it wrong.” Would it be fair to locate it in the person of Jesus himself?
Joe Heschmeyer:
It would be. So, we see this in a really explicit way in John 6. We see it also in the last supper discourses and also in the way that St. Paul presents Jesus’ theology in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11. That throughout this, the natural reading of the text… And, the reading that I want to really stress, was taken by the earliest Christians, was that when he says, “This is my body and this is my blood,” what he means is, “This is my body and this is my blood.” He doesn’t mean, “This is a symbol of my body. This is a symbol of my blood.” And that the Christians who read him this way, weren’t flatfooted literalists, meaning they weren’t too dumb to know what a metaphor was or what a symbol was or what imagery was. They talk about symbolism and imagery and metaphor of these things. They even talk about the imagery and the symbolism within the Eucharist, but also affirm that it really is actually the body and blood of Christ. Unlike modern Protestants, who see the symbolism, perhaps, but don’t see the rest of it.
Cy Kellett:
So, it wouldn’t be the case where we could say, “Well, sure, if you’re going to read Justin Martyr, who I believe is second century, mid-second century. Am I-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
… about right?
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, he’s a 150 with dialogue with Trypho, 160 with the first apology or those are roughly the dates we assign.
Cy Kellett:
So, it wouldn’t be the case to say, “Well, sure, Justin Martyr is going to give you this view.” But again, this is something that’s 150, well 120 years of development. But, you’d say, “No, rather, whatever lens we might look at the sixth chapter of John’s gospel,” for example, “today. The lens that was always and consistently applied to it in the ancient world, in the earliest Church was that this truly is the body and blood of Jesus. It has all the symbolic value that anyone might want to give it, that God has indeed given, but it is the body and blood of the Lord.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, exactly. And, this is part of… I think you’ve kind of alluded to one of the issues here, is that the person who says the apostles have got it wrong is in a tough position when they try to explain what Jesus actually taught, because how do we know what Jesus taught. Well, through the writings of the apostles? And, if you think the apostles are heretics, the game of Christianity’s up. You just don’t have anything left to salvage there, and it looks suspiciously like you’re just creating your own Jesus. That you’re just imagining he stood behind the words that we have recorded through the apostles.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, it’s very clear. I want to give you maybe one concrete example that gets into this question, 120 years of development. Well, I think there’s a couple things we can say to that. One is the earliest, extra biblical writing, that is to say the earliest writings outside the Bible that treat the Eucharist are from the first century or the first decade of the second century. So in the pre 100s to about 110, you’re going to find the first writings that talk about this. And, sometimes these writings are shorter. So, you’re not getting like a lengthy Eucharistic exposition. But for instance, The Didache does treat the Eucharist as a sacrifice and connects it to the prophecy in Malachi 1, which talks about the pure sacrifice being offered around the world. It very explicitly views the Eucharist as the fulfillment of that. But then, you also have, especially St. Ignatius of Antioch, and he talks about the real presence. He talks about the presence of the… And when we say real presence here, I don’t just mean that Jesus is somehow present in with and under bread and wine.
Joe Heschmeyer:
I mean that Ignatius’s view is that the Eucharist is the body and blood of Jesus Christ. And, he’s writing against probably Gnostics. There were certainly what we would call Docetists in that they didn’t believe Jesus literally took on human flesh. They didn’t believe the incarnation was literal. They thought it was an illusion because flesh is evil. So, how could a good God take on flesh? So Ignatius really famously in the letter to the Smyrnaeans says, “Well, abstain from them. You can’t have communion with them because they don’t confess the Eucharist to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” The problem with that from a Protestant perspective of course, is that they also don’t confess the Eucharist to be the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, D.A. Carson is one person I mentioned in the book. He’s Don Carson. He’s a pretty popular author and preacher and a bunch of other things. And one of the things he treats, and he has a whole commentary on the gospel of John. And when he is situating the gospel of John, he admits the first time we get clear indications about who wrote John’s gospels or what the four gospels are, is in about 180, Saint Irenaeus. But he says, “Well, we can trust it because even though that’s kind of late, his personal connection with Polycarp who knew John means the distance in terms of personal memories is not very great.” So you’re saying, even though 180-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, I see.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… sounds like a long time on paper. But, he studied under Polycarp who knew John personally and was a disciple of John.
Cy Kellett:
So, what you’re saying, Joe is that this Protestant defender of John’s gospel is defending it by saying, “You can trace it through Polycarp who knew the apostle John. So if you can trace it through Polycarp, who knew the apostle of John, then you can give it all the credence that you would want to give. That more or less proves that this is in fact, the actual gospel of St. John.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, and I think that’s actually a good argument. I think Carson is right about this. John dies probably around the year, 100. And by this point, Polycarp has studied under him for perhaps decades. We have a pretty good idea of when Polycarp was born and died. We don’t know how long he was with John, but we have a sense just based on John’s own death. Polycarp is martyred as an old man in 155. So then when you have, 25 years after that, Irenaeus, who was a hearer of John, meaning he’d studied under him and seemingly even into adulthood. When he’s writing these things, we know we can trust this because it isn’t just some vague recollection of something that happened 200 years ago. This is really just the transmission of the gospel from John to a student, to a student. But-
Cy Kellett:
So, okay gotcha.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It’s pretty short chain.
Cy Kellett:
I think I know how this relates to the Eucharist because would the same Protestant author accept what Polycarp and…
Joe Heschmeyer:
Ignatius.
Cy Kellett:
Ignatius, excuse me. I got Irenaeus stuck in my head… had to say about the Eucharist.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, you’re right on the point. So then in Carson’s same commentary on John, you jump to John 6, and he admits that John adopts what he calls as a Sacramentarian stance on the Eucharist. And, it’s very, excuse me, that Ignatius adopts, a Sacramentarian stance on the Eucharist. It’s very clear from Ignatius’ writings, this is true.
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Joe Heschmeyer:
He calls it the medicine of immortality, the antidote which prevents us from dying, a cleansing remedy driving away evil, which causes we should live in God through Jesus Christ. That whole thing I was describing earlier in the letter to the Smyrnaeans and a bunch of other references that just make it clear what his view was, that even this Protestant is saying, “Yeah. He takes this pretty sacramental view of the Eucharist.” And Carson’s response to this is really remarkable. He says, “Well, how could so near a contemporary and presumably disciple use such language.” Then he points out that Ignatius says a lot of things that are incompatible with Protestant theology, monarchical bishops, that sort of thing. And he says, “Well, anyone who’s followed theological development from the 20th century, let alone the 16th or the 1st does not need convincing that major changes can be introduced in the space of 20 years, even by disciples of a revered leader.” In other words-
Cy Kellett:
Oops.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah, his whole chain argument, he totally refutes it. Totally contradicts it, totally says, “Well, we can trust up to 180, but we can’t trust even a 20 year span.” But frankly, we’re not even looking at a 20 year span. Ignatius, his writings are in about 107. We’re looking at a seven year span since the death of John. That we can’t trust Ignatius, could remember the teachings of the gospel for seven years, but 73 years later we could trust that a disciple of a disciple was able to remember the four gospels. It’s a remarkably strange kind of argument-
Cy Kellett:
But, we would agree with them-
Joe Heschmeyer:
That doesn’t make a lot of sense-
Cy Kellett:
The premise of the argument is correct that you can have… I mean, the argument that he makes about the gospel of John, which is-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Oh yeah-
Cy Kellett:
You can trust the gospel of John. It has a very clear providence, and it’s supported by testimony of people who knew John, but we would just go a step further than he’s willing to go, which is to say, you can also trust what Jesus says in the sixth chapter of John’s gospel as being literally true because the people who knew John, the author of that gospel, believed it was literally true. So, the early church was Eucharistic.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Yeah. And, I could even say, not only is his first argument true, but there’s even an element of truth in his second argument, as long as you caveat it very carefully. Which is to say, “It’s possible someone has an Orthodox teacher and then falls into heresy.” But, we should see evidence of that. And, we do see evidence of that actually happening when we go back to the second century. There’s a fellow by the name of Florinus, who is another follower of St. Polycarp. So, Polycarp is a disciple of John and then, Polycarp has two well known disciples, one of them good, one of them bad. The good one is Irenaeus. The bad one is Florinus. Florinus becomes Gnostic. Irenaeus writes to him and says, “Basically, look buddy, we both studied under Polycarp, and he didn’t teach anything about this Gnosticism stuff. Where are you getting this?”
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, he knows that these are novelties, and he calls them out as such. If Carson’s view is right, if Ignatius is introducing novelties, he’s teaching, introducing new false teachings, that’s not impossible, but we should see some outcry. We should see some people writing a letter, like what Irenaeus writes to Florinus, saying, “Hey, what’s going on here? This isn’t what we believe.” Because, it isn’t like the apostles only taught one or two people. It’s that they taught the entire Church. They taught the entire community. So even if a favored disciple of John suddenly comes out with some crazy teaching, there are other Johannine Christians, there are other Christians more broadly who would have no problem saying, “Sorry, that’s not what Jesus Christ taught.”
Cy Kellett:
Right-
Joe Heschmeyer:
“That’s not what the apostles taught us.”
Cy Kellett:
And, we have plenty of evidence of that because things like Gnosticism were opposed even by the apostles themselves, by John himself, certainly. At least what would be the proto-Gnosticism, if it wasn’t full Gnosticism. And then, a constant and battle against false ideas for these first hundreds of years of the church, and they’re false, why? The kind of the litmus test is, is it false or is it true? Well, that’s not what the apostles taught. There’s the faith of the apostles-
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
So, no one ever goes, “Well, the Eucharist is the body and blood of the Lord, Jesus.” And, then other people go, “Well, that’s not what the apostles taught,” even though they were saying that about many other things.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Exactly. If you walked into a Protestant church and said, this is truly the body and blood of Jesus Christ, most Protestants would say, “Whoa, hold on a second. That’s not what we believe here. Let’s at least make sure we understand that you’re speaking metaphorically.” There’d be some kind of or… In what way is Christ present, depending on the particular theology of that Protestant church. That’s not how the early Christians react at all. There’s no surprise about it. In fact, even when you find Ignatius writing to the Smyrnaeans to warn them against Gnostics. He’s not trying to convince them that they should take the same view of the Eucharist he has. He assumes they already do. And that, therefore, they’re not going to accept communion with anyone who doesn’t take that view. He’s already treating this as a litmus test for Christian orthodoxy in 107. That’s a really remarkable sort of state of events. That’s not at all what we would find if the early Church was Protestant.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Again, a seven year time span there doesn’t allow heresy to slowly creep in. There’s no world in which you can say, “The apostles taught everyone really well and seven years later, they all forgot what the apostles had taught and innocently believed they taught this other thing.” On a human level, that doesn’t make sense. Seven years ago was 2015. That’s just not long in the span of events. So the other kind of dimension to that too, is that even the Gnostics, you find them having to argue that Gnosticism was the secret teaching of the apostles, which is a tacit admission, that it wasn’t what the apostles were publicly teaching.
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, you get these kind of indications when a teaching is actually new. So, we do find a teacher who comes along and presents some really novel views of the Eucharist, but it isn’t Ignatius of Antioch. It’s Martin Luther, and Martin Luther even recognizes that his view of the Eucharist is a novelty. He argued that there’s no belief in the Church, more generally received, or more firmly held than that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice. We hear it all the time. The holy sacrifice in the mass. If you listen to the words of the Canon of the mass, it compares it to the sacrifices of Abel and to Melchizedek. So takeaway there is that even Luther, when he’s attacking the sacrificial nature of the mass, doesn’t say, “These crazy Catholics in the last couple years came up with this new idea that the mass is a sacrifice.” He argues that, “No, this is what everybody believes,” that this is as universal a belief as you’re going to find in Christianity. And, he still rejected it.
Joe Heschmeyer:
John Calvin says something really similar. He argued that Satan somehow not only obscured and perverted, but altogether obliterated and abolished the Lord’s supper when he blinded almost the whole world into the belief that the mass was a sacrifice and oblation for obtaining the remission of sins. What both of those guys are doing is very much like what Gnostics were doing. Where they have to say, “Yeah. We know this isn’t the view you were taught. We know this isn’t the traditional view that’s been passed down. But guess what, that traditional view is actually wrong.” And they do it in different ways. The Gnostics say, “Well, because Jesus had a secret set of teachings.” The Protestants say, “Well, because the devil tricked everybody.” But in both cases, the fact they have to make that argument shows this is not the view held by the early Church. This is not the traditional view. And that, the Catholic view was instead the view held from the earliest days of the Church and by everyone.
Cy Kellett:
So, I feel like we’ve handled the controversy part of it. I want to get a little bit of history from you. And if there are other church fathers you want to point to as particularly salient that you need to mention, that would be fine. Then, I’ll ask my question or do you… Go ahead, you look like-
Joe Heschmeyer:
There are a lot. In the book, I purposely confined myself up to only about the year 200 or so. It’s a soft end point. But, I try to not get too deep into the 200s. For the simple reason that, people can say, “Well, that’s, that’s too late, heresy could have crept in, error could have slowly-
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Joe Heschmeyer:
… taken root in the Church. By confining myself to the first 200 years, if you’re going to reject that… Like D.A. Carson points out, “The first clear witness to what the four gospels are, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the apostolic authority and authorship of them, that’s not until about 180.” So if you don’t trust Christianity up until then, we’ve got a much bigger problem than just Catholic versus Protestant. Because, you can’t even defend basic Christian doctrine. The first use of the word Trinity is in 181. So given all of that, I’m keeping myself very narrowly. I mentioned this because there’s some beautiful stuff written on the Eucharist in the 200s, 300s, 400s-
Cy Kellett:
But you didn’t get-
Joe Heschmeyer:
But, you got to ignore all of… Yes.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Joe Heschmeyer:
It would’ve been a much longer book and a much different book. Irenaeus, who we talked about before, talks about how the Lord instituted a new ablation in the new covenant. That’s a new sacrifice. And, he connects it with this prophecy that a lot of the church fathers go back to. It’s one that I don’t hear a lot of Catholics today using, but I don’t know why because it’s mentioned, as I said, in the Didache and Justin Martyr and St. Irenaeus.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And so in the first and second century, when Christians were explaining the mass as sacrifice, you would regularly go back to this passage in Malachi 1, in which God says in verse 10 to 12, “I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord of hosts, and I will not accept an offering from your hand, for from the rising of the sun to its setting, my name is great among the nations and in every place incense is offered to my name in a pure offering. For my name is great among the nations says the Lord of hosts. But, you profane it when you say that the Lord’s table is polluted and the food for it may be despised.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
So why is that passage significant? Well, one, it shows that the Lord’s table or the table of the Lord, isn’t just a table of fellowship. It’s connected to the altar. It’s connected to the sacrifice. And so, that changes our understanding of what’s going on in the Lord’s supper. If you think of the Lord’s supper as a fellowship meal, that’s missing this whole sacrificial dimension. There’s something more to it than just that. And, we get a hint of that as far back as Malachi 1. I would say you also get that very clearly in 1 Corinthians 10, when St Paul compares the table of the Lord to the pagan altars, that he calls the table of demons and to the Jewish altar, where you become partakers in the sacrifice. That in paganism and in Judaism and in Christianity, the central element of worship was to offer sacrifice and then to eat that sacrifice. And if you don’t get that point in 1 Corinthians 10, then you’re missing what he’s doing with that kind of threefold parallel.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Well, the early Christians go back to this text in Malachi and make the same point, that if the Eucharist isn’t a sacrifice, what is he promising? What’s he for telling this oblation that’s going to be offered up all over the world. This pure sacrifice to be offered up everywhere. And they would say, “This is it. This is a fulfillment of that.” And at the time, it was a really relevant point because some of these guys had come from a Jewish background. And so, you have this Jewish prophecy saying, “Yeah, the Gentiles, the nations, are going to be able to offer true worship and true sacrifice.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
And the other text that kind of points to this is one that I think gets misused a lot. But, it’s when Jesus is speaking to the Samaritan woman in John 4, and they’re talking about worshiping in spirit and in truth. Now the kind of standard Protestant read on this and the one that I’ve heard, even from a lot of Catholics, imagines that like, “Well, before Jesus, you couldn’t pray except through priests, or you couldn’t pray except in the temple and then Jesus comes along and now, you can pray directly to God. And, every part of that is wrong. Even the Pharisees stand on the street corners and pray. The Samaritan woman can pray whatever she wants. What can’t happen is worship in the sense of offering true sacrifice, that that can only happen in the temple for a Jew or on Mount Gerizim for a Samaritan. That, it’s specifically about the sacrifice, not about offering prayers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
People are offering prayers without the intermediary, the mediation of a priest, throughout all this time. Think about all the times Jesus goes into a synagogue, and they’re praying in there. They’re not offering worship though. They’re not offering sacrifice. So in this conversation, if you don’t get that dimension, then none of the rest of it makes sense. He’s not saying, “Pray wherever you want.” They know they can pray wherever they want. He’s saying, “A style of worship, of sacrifice is coming that’s not going to be confined to Jerusalem. That’s not going to be confined to Mount Gerizim. It’s going to be confined to wherever you can offer it up in spirit and in truth.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
And this is not just like Joe Heschmeyer saying this, right? This is St. Irenaeus, who D.A. Carson rightly pointed out, is a faithful disciple of Polycarp, who’s a disciple of the Apostle John. He makes this point, and he makes it to say that, “The oblation of the Eucharist is not a carnal one, but a spiritual one. And in this respect, it is pure. That because the mass is this spiritual offering of the son to the father, and we unite our own offerings with the son’s, that’s what makes this a fulfillment of John 4.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
So, he has this whole passage where he points to this as a fulfillment of those Old Testament and New Testament prophecies. That’s a really rich kind of theology of the sacrifice of the mass. I know this is a long answer, but we often talk as Catholics about the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. And, that’s true. But, we often miss that one of the major points distinguishing Catholics from Protestants is a belief that the Eucharist is truly a sacrifice, and we get to participate in that sacrifice.
Cy Kellett:
How beautiful that… And, I recognize from that prophecy from Malachi that you read the words that we do find in some of the Eucharistic prayers in the Church. So clearly, that connection is being made there in the Eucharistic prayers. But the question I wanted to end with, if I may, and take it and run with it any direction that you want. But RCIA, the person comes to RCIA these days, and they have to be taught about the Eucharist. And so, we know what they’re taught. They’re taught about the real presence, as you said. They’re taught about essences and accidents and those kinds of things.
Cy Kellett:
So what would the RCIA student of the year say, I don’t know, 110 or 70, what would… Because, they did have a process of basic catechesis before being received into the Church. So what would’ve been said about the Eucharist, because it’s not completely wrong to say that Eucharistic theology has developed. It has developed, the theology. But, the basic thing hasn’t changed. And so what would’ve been said to me, I’m Cyrillus of Antioch and I’m like, “I believe in this Jesus stuff, teach me about it.” And, what would they have said to me about the Eucharist?
Joe Heschmeyer:
We have a few indications. So St. Justin Martyr, one of the things he’s going to talk about are the kind of standards under which you can receive the Eucharist. And so, I’m thinking here specifically, pre 200, things written to outsiders. So, that’s a pretty narrow set of texts I have to work with here. You don’t have ancient rituals of RCIA. But, I know Justin Martyr says that, “The Eucharist is that food of which no one is allowed to partake, but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true and who has been washed with the washing that is further remission of sins and under regeneration and who is so living as Christ has enjoined.”
Joe Heschmeyer:
In other words, the three criteria to know if you can receive the Eucharist are, one, you need to believe the teachings of the Catholic church. Two, you need to be baptized. And three, you need to be in a state of grace, we now say. You need to be living in a Christian manner. And if you’re not meeting those three, if you don’t believe what the church teaches, if you’re not baptized, or if you are a baptized Catholic, but you’re not living in a Christian manner, then you can’t go up for communion. That’s one thing we know they taught. And so, that gives a clear kind of fence, so to speak, around the sacrament. That there’s a clear sense of, “Okay, well, it’s not for everyone. They don’t have anything like open communion,” which you find in many cases in the Protestant world, not in all. There’s a clear sense that they say, again, kind of a mark that distinguishes the Catholic view.
Joe Heschmeyer:
And, then the Didache says something similar. It says, “Let none eat or drink of your Eucharist, except those who’ve been baptized in the Lord’s name and for concerning this also did the Lord say, give not that which is holy to the dogs.” And so, there is a sense of, this is the holy center of Christianity. And, it’s not just for anyone to just kind of come in and receive on their own. In this way, it’s a fulfillment of the Passover meal. The Passover meal was closed to the uncircumcised. Exodus 12 said, “You can invite sojourners and strangers to the Passover meal, but they must be circumcised.” There is that sense, and that’s prefiguring baptism. There’s a sense that there’s some basic criteria. Now later on, we actually get the homilies written by later Church fathers that talk about what the Eucharist is, and it’s really beautiful to see their explanations and the way that they really draw these connections. But like I said, I’m purposely confining myself the earliest fathers, but it gives us a clear sense of what they believed.
Cy Kellett:
Joe Heschmeyer, thanks as always. It’s just great to talk with you. The book is The Early Church Was the Catholic Church. You can get it on the internet, just look it up. You can get it at amazon.com. But you can probably get a deal on it. There usually is some kind of deal over at shop.catholic.com. Thanks, Joe.
Joe Heschmeyer:
My pleasure.
Cy Kellett:
If all us Catholics do what we’re supposed to do this year and maybe next year and maybe even the coming decades, will be a time of revitalizing the Catholic sense of the Eucharist of sharing it with others in of living it more and more deeply ourselves. That’s certainly the effort that the Pope is engaged upon, that the bishops are engaged upon, that I hope your priests, certainly the priests that I know, are engaged upon. And, we laity should be engaged upon as well, knowing and loving Jesus in the Eucharist and sharing that Eucharist with as many people as we can get to accept that, that is Christ in the Eucharist, so that they too will have eternal life within them. That’s why we start the year with a very nice Eucharistic show and maybe, we’ll do a lot more on the Eucharist this year.
Cy Kellett:
If you’ve got ideas for future shows, how about this? Just send us an email focus@catholic.com is our email address, focus@catholic.com. If you like what we do and would like to support us financially, you can do that at givecatholic.com. And as I mentioned at the beginning, if you or maybe anyone you know would like to stay in contact with us and keep getting these, we’d love it if you’d subscribe on YouTube because we’re still growing that new YouTube channel that we’ve started for this program, Catholic Answers Focus. You can just look under Catholic Answers Focus on YouTube and when you find our page, subscribe to it and then hit the little bell, so you’ll be notified when new episodes are available. If you’re a listener, and you’re listening on a local podcast or a global podcast service, whatever podcast service you’re listening on, if you like and subscribe, then you will be notified when new episodes are available. Oh, it’s already been a tough year. I’m losing my voice. I’ll see you next time, god willing, right here on Catholic Answers Focus.