How the Eucharist Defeated Gnosticism

St. Paul comes in with a very strange sounding theology in first Corinthians 15 when he’s talking about the resurrection of the dead. He says, what is sewn is perishable. What is raised is imperishable. It’s sewn in dishonor, it’s raised in glory. It’s sewn in weaknesses, raised in power. But then he says it is sown a physical body. It is raised a spiritual body. Now he’s clearly jumping into the fray in this fight about the resurrected body, but what in the world is he saying this is something that can cause a good deal of confusion. What does he mean about this physical body and spiritual body? Well, I want to turn of all places to Bart Airman, the agnostic, atheist, leading, agnostic biblical scholar because I think he does actually a pretty good job on this subject. On his own blog, he talks about how if asked Paul would’ve said that the grave was empty, he’s not denying the empty tomb.

What he’s saying here is the opposite of that. He says, the body that comes out of the tomb is the same body that went into the tomb, but it’s been transformed. It’s a transformed but not a different body. It’s a body that’s been made immortal. So this is a transformation not Jesus throughout his old body and got a new one. Well, that obviously is going to impact how we think about our resurrected bodies. I think many Christians have the idea that we throw out our earthly bodies and get some new bodies that aren’t the same body, but rather the Christian messages of a transformed body. The physical body and spiritual body is the same body. It’s all grown up talking about a tadpole and a frog. We don’t annihilate the tadpole and then get a new animal called the frog. It’s the same thing all grown up.

And Airman talks about this in his book, how Jesus became God. As you might imagine from that title, there’s a lot that I would reject in the book, but I think he does a good job laying the foundation for the fight between Christians agnostics. And he explains that this passage in one Corinthians 15 can be confusing for many of us modern readers because we don’t understand how there could be a spiritual body that’s still an actual body because we tend to think of spirit and body as two opposite things. The spirit being invisible and non-material and the body being visible and material. But this is our problem. We are coming at this. That body is the opposite of spirit. And so if something is spiritual, it’s necessarily disembodied. But as he points out, ancient people didn’t typically see spirit and body related in this way.

So here in one Corinthians 15, Paul is stressing that Jesus really did rise from the dead in a spiritual body. And as he points out, both terms are important. It’s a body, but it’s a spiritual body. Jesus was raised in the body. It’s a body that is now spiritual. Now we tend to misunderstand and undervalue that first point that Jesus rises again in a body. But as he points out, this is really what Paul is trying to prove to the Christians in Corinth. This is the point he’s making. He’s not debating the spiritual part of the resurrection. He’s debating the bodily part of the resurrection because that’s the thing his Corinthian readers are stumbling on in their opposing view. Now, obviously not everybody in Corinth, but the people Paul is correcting. Jesus was raised in the spirit, not in the body. So similarly, Christians enjoy the resurrection with him in their own lives. They’re also spiritually raised, not in their bodies but in their inner being. So in that view you could say, oh, I’m already enjoying resurrected life because I’ve been spiritually transformed internally. It’s all an internal sort of thing. And Paul is like, that is not what we mean by the resurrection. This is not just a spiritual reality, it’s a spiritual transformation of the body.

Airman goes on to point out that some ancient Christians take a very similar line to Paul’s Corinthian opponents and maintain that Jesus was raised in the spirit, not in the body. So his body in this view died and rotted in the grave because that’s what bodies do. And his spirit is what lived on in Asce into heaven. And as he points out, this is a view that was associated with a lot of groups of gnostics. So we’re talking about gnostic fight. This is what we mean. There are these two basic camps. On the one hand you’ve got the Catholic view, the body is transformed and glorified, but it’s still the same body. In the gnostic view, we throw out the body and we’re resurrected in quotation marks as disembodied spirits. That’s the view they have of our bodily resurrection. That’s the view they had of Jesus’s bodily resurrection.

And that’s completely contrary to the view we find in the New Testament. So how did the early Christians defeat gnosticism? Well, I already gave you the answer in the beginning, in no small part through a sound in really surprisingly nuanced eucharistic theology. I want to really stress here, this is extremely early on. We see St. Paul battling the seeds of this movement in Corinth in the New Testament itself, and we see the earliest Christians continuing this fight. I want to look at the work of two of them. The first one, Saint Ignatius of Antioch. Now, I looked at him in a different video recently, but I want to return to one thing he said and then bring in another thing that I didn’t mention last time. So the first is the thing I mentioned before in his letter to the church in Smyrna, he warns against what appear to be these gnostics and he warns that they abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered verse ends in which the father of his goodness raised up again.

So just a couple things to note there. Number one, he takes it for granted that his Christian readers already know that the Eucharist is the flesh of Jesus Christ. He doesn’t have to begin by explaining, oh, we actually believe the Eucharist is the flesh of Christ. No, he starts from that as a given and then he goes to his second point, which is that because of their dualism, gnostics can’t affirm that the Eucharist is the flesh of Christ. So that just notice this is what he’s using, the Eucharistic theology they share to show that gnostics aren’t like them, that they’re not part of the group. He goes on to say those therefore who speak against this gift of God, what’s the gift of God? He’s talking about the Eucharist. Those who speak against this gift of God incurred death in the midst of their disputes, but we’re better for them to treat it with respect that they also might rise again.

So two more points to notice here. First, rejecting Christ’s presence in the Eucharist is at least potentially damnable. This is a really big deal. And second, a proper relationship to the Eucharist is key somehow to rising. Again, that is it’s key somehow to bodily resurrection. The very thing being disputed with gnostics here. But then here’s the passage I didn’t mention from Ignatius that really touches on some of these same themes and pretty explicitly in his letter to the Ephesians in chapter 20, he talks about the need to obey the bishop and the presbytery with an undivided mind breaking one in the same bread, which is to say having the same Eucharist, but it says breaking one in the same bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote to prevent us from dying, but which causes that we should live forever in Jesus Christ.

That’s really big. I want to point out three real quick things on this. First you just heard him say it, the Eucharist is a medicine of immortality that leads to eternal life somehow. Second, the Eucharist is doing something in US. Medicine does something and it’s doing this in a way that leads to eternal life. But the third point I’d make here is just Ignatius doesn’t actually explain how that works. He’s taking for granted that there is a connection between eucharistic theology and resurrection. Both Christ’s resurrection somehow and our bodily resurrection, it’s the key to immortality. He doesn’t flesh that out. If you’ll permit a really cheesy pun later, Christian theologians will do that. So Ignatius is writing around the year 1 0 7. Let’s jump forward about 73 years. Saint S of Leon. He’s the guy who as always mentioned is the first to tell us Matthew, mark, Luke, and John are the four gospels.

He’s this incredibly important figure, particularly in the fight against gnosticism until the discovery of the Hamadi library in the 20th century. Most of what we knew about gnosticism actually came from Ana’s encyclopedic outline of what different gnostic groups believed and what their theology was. And he did a pretty good job of being very fair to a very strange and complicated system. But in this, he also raises several reasons why he thinks they’re wrong. Remember the book that he writes is called against heresies. He isn’t just saying, Hey, your way good too. He’s explaining what it gets wrong. And so in book four he asks the question rhetorically, then again, how can they say that the flesh which is nourished with the body of the Lord and with his blood goes to corruption and does not partake of life? Notice what he’s doing there. He is saying, okay, how could they possibly believe that bodily resurrection doesn’t happen given what we know about the Eucharist?

He’s making the same confusing perhaps to modern ears argument that if you have a good eucharistic theology, then you see why bodily resurrection is logically entailed there. So let’s just ask where are they getting? We get Ignatius and RNAs both making just almost as an aside this, well look, if you’ve got good Eucharistic theology, therefore bodily resurrection follows from this. The body is not just going to end up in the grave forever because it’s been nourished by the Eucharist. Where are they getting that from? Well, they’re getting it from Jesus of Nazareth in John chapter six, when Jesus is posed the question, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? He responds by saying, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. But then he says, he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day. So there is very clearly in scripture itself some kind of connection between the Eucharist and eternal life between the Eucharist and bodily resurrection. That’s what it means to raise him up at the last day, raise up what his resurrected transformed spiritualized body.

Go back to RNAs now in book four, there’s that line I just quoted and then after pointing out that the gnostic view of the body is inconsistent with a good eucharistic theology, he says, let them therefore alter their opinion or cease from offering the things just mentioned. That’s fascinating. It sounds like it leaks. Some gnostics also believed in the real presence of Christ and the Eucharist, but he just sort of throws it out there. He then says, and this is I think the more important part, but our opinion is in accordance with the Eucharist. And the Eucharist in turn establishes our opinion. In earlier videos, I’ve pointed to certain modern theologians who think that the Eucharist is a sort of secondary issue. It’s something Christians can just agree to disagree on. That’s not how the earliest Christians understood it. The Eucharist is at the center. It is establishing our opinion on other really important things like the resurrection. That’s huge. So notice he again is taken for granted that other Christians share his Eucharistic theology. He’s not just writing to one local church the way Ignatius is. He’s writing to everybody and he still takes for granted a common Eucharistic theology shared among Christians. And second, since the Eucharist leads to bodily resurrection, we cannot hold to gnostic denial of bodily resurrection. They can’t be right that we just discard our bodies since our bodies have been transformed in some way by the Eucharist.

CE is going to go on to say he’s still in book four here that we offer to him, meaning to God, his own announcing consistently the fellowship and union of the flesh and spirit, okay, offering notice this is sacrificial kind of language. This is important for having a nuanced eucharistic theology. This isn’t just a memorial, this is an actual offering to God. And then he explains as the bread which is produced from the Earth when it receives the invocation of God is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist consisting of two realities, earthly and heavenly. So also our bodies when they receive the Eucharist are no longer corruptible having the hope of the resurrection to e eternal to eternity. So notice again, this is all pretty explicitly spelled out now, sometimes when people read this passage not understanding the gnostic context in which it’s being written, that he’s responding to gnosticism, they’ll stumble on those words that the Eucharist consists of two realities, earthly and heavenly.

And so reading it through the lens of modern Protestantism, if you’re like a Lutheran or something, you might say, aha, this is cons substantiation. It’s both really the body and blood of Christ and it’s just bread and wine somehow simultaneously. That’s not at all what RNAs is saying here in context. He’s responding to people who have this trouble with material reality. They just think the spiritual realm is good and the material realm is bad. And his point is that Christ is a union of flesh and spirit. And so when we offer Christ to the Father, there’s two realities being offered there, earthly his flesh and heavenly his spirit. We offer body, blood, soul, and divinity to the Father, not just body and blood, not just soul and divinity. So notice these three things. The Eucharist is number one, an offering of Christ’s flesh and spirit and it is an offering there.

Number two, similarly, the Eucharist creates an our bodies, this dual heavenly and earthly reality. We are no longer merely destined bodily to rotten the grave. And number three, I’d suggest this is a prefigurement of the kind of spiritual bodies that St. Paul talks about in one Corinthians 15 that St. Paul is also talking about this dual nature of the heavenly and spiritual dimension to this bodily reality when he talks about spiritual bodies. So I think the way to read this is to read it through the lens of St. Paul rather than through the lens of like Martin Luther or later theologians. What he’s arguing for here is not consubstantiation when he’s arguing for is that Christ is both bodily and spiritually being offered to the Father, which is huge. It’s a very rich eucharistic theology. He goes on in book five to say win therefore the mingled cup and the manufactured bread receives the word of God and the Eucharist of the blood and the body of Christ is made.

Okay, so you’ve got the cup and you got the bread. It receives the word of God, the words of institution and the Eucharist of the body and blood is made. There’s something that’s actually transformative happening here from which the substance of our flesh is increased and supported. So we are bodily receiving Christ in the Eucharist. How can they gnostics affirm that this flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God? Now, if you watched my earlier video, the Gnostic strand in Protestantism, I point out that Charles Spurgeon and other kind of Baptist theologians, and you can find others as well, I just focused on this version, argue against the Eucharist. Like how can the flesh receive grace in this way? Grace is something received in the soul, not so according to the earliest Christians. He’s making the point, how can they affirm the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal, which fleshes nourished from the body and blood of the Lord and is a member of him.

It’s not just that we’ve spiritually received Christ, we have now bodily received Christ and then he connects us to when St. Paul says to the Ephesians that we are members of his body and he says, of his flesh and of his bones. So this Eucharistic theology, he’s making an important connection here that in this participation in the Eucharist, we are in a real sense acting as and becoming the body of Christ the church. That’s what it means when the reference St. Paul’s making to the Ephesians that we are members of his body. So what this evokes, at least for me is one Corinthians chapter 10 verse 17, where St. Paul says, because there is one bread or because there is one loaf, we who are many are one body for we all partake of the one bread, meaning the eucharistic body of Christ creates the ecclesial like the church body of Christ.

When we talk about body of Christ, sometimes we mean the church, sometimes we mean the Eucharist. And Paul is saying there’s a connection here and EU is also saying there’s a connection here. But then EU goes on to say, notice he Paul does not speak these words of some spiritual and invisible man for a spirit. And then he quotes Luke 24 about the resurrected body for spirit has not bones nor flesh. So when Jesus appears, he makes a point that he’s not a ghost because the spirit doesn’t have bones and flesh and the resurrected Christ does. So the body of Christ, notice here the body of Christ created in the Eucharist and through which we become the body of Christ. The church is a physical or corporeal be a better word, a corporeal reality. So the body of Christ, the Eucharist, the body of Christ, the church is corporeal.

It’s not merely an invisible church. It’s not merely in its spiritual like ghostly sort of reality, whether it’s a ghostly church or a ghostly memorial offering of the Eucharist. No, there’s something corporeal in the Eucharist, something corporeal in the body of Christ, the church, something bodily because that’s the whole notion of what it is to be bodily. The last thing I want to point out, and this is something I think is pretty beautiful about the Eucharistic theology. Reina is putting out there, he looks at what we might call three Eucharistic transformations first, and this is all in book five. First he says, just as a cutting from the vine planted in the ground, frt defies in its season or a grain of wheat falling into the earth and becoming decomposed rises of manifold increase by the spirit of God who contains all things. So let’s just pause on that.

What’s the first example? He’s giving us the example of grapes and wheat becoming bread and wine, that there is this process in which there’s apparent death, the grain of wheat falls into the earth and it seems to die, but this is actually important for the life-giving property and then the grain has to be ground up and the wine has to be stomped to be transformed into bread and wine. This is something a lot of early Christians focused on, which especially was really rich at a time where there’s a lot of martyrdom of Christians. And so Ignatius can declare himself to be grained, to be ground up in the teeth of the lions. Something like this sort of eucharistic transformation that the grain in the grapes are going to become through a process of crushing death, transformation, bread and wine. Now, where is that coming from?

I would suggest, I mean besides agriculture, we should be looking to John chapter 12 where Jesus says truly, truly a city, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. So that notion that there’s some kind of reality going on, a transformation even just in the physical process of grain and grape becoming bread and wine, they’re attuned to that probably because Jesus uses that as an example. That then leads to the second Eucharistic transformation that then, so you’ve got the bread and wine now and then through the wisdom of God and having received the word of God becomes the Eucharist, which is the body and blood of Christ. So the second transformation body and bread and wine through the word of God, become the flesh and blood of Christ pretty clearly. Then he leads to a third Eucharistic transformation.

So also our bodies being nourished by it, that it’s by the Eucharist and being deposited in the earth. I love this image of planting. When you get buried, it’s like you’ve been planted in the earth like the grain of wheat that falls through the ground, which again, it’s not a stretch given that was Jesus’s point in John 1224, that we are like that grain of wheat that falls in the ground. So now having received the Eucharist, the bread of God, we are being planted in the ground and suffering decomposition. There shall arise at their appointed time. The word of God granting them resurrection to the glory of God, even the Father who freely gives to this mortal immortality into the corruptible and corruption. So the third transformation is that our bodies transformed already by the Eucharist are planted in the earth and death only to rise again, transformed just as we saw that transformation of grape and wheat into bread and wine and the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ and the Eucharist.

So now we too are being transformed in this way, and that’s how he explains this kind of eucharistic connection to the resurrected body. I want to just point out this is a really rich and nuanced eucharistic theology to have very early on in the life of the church. And also this is one of the major arguments being marshaled against gnostics that hey, admittedly, some of the bodily resurrection passages in places like one Corinthians 15 can sound a little confusing. What does it mean to say physical body vis-a-vis spiritual body? You can see how someone would think, okay, that means it’s a disembodied body in quotation marks because it’s not physical. And yet they’re using this very clear teaching on the Eucharist to clarify a bit of confusion Gnostics had over the resurrected body. That’s just a matter of history. And so if you’re someone who is a Christian, but you don’t share this eucharistic theology, imagine yourself in this situation where you have these two camps.

You have the Christian side saying, here’s our Eucharistic theology and we know gnosticism is false because it doesn’t match up with it. And then you have the gnostic side, which in many cases rejected that Eucharistic theology. And I would just ask, where do you find yourself? Where do you land on this question? Because it seems pretty important that key to the Christian fight is a eucharistic theology that many Christians are either oblivious to now or even deny in some cases that if we can’t stand shoulder to shoulder with the early Christians in their fight against gnosticism, I think it says something bad about modern Christianity. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.