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Following Joe’s debate with James White, he lays out the case for why the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice and the most essential Christian practice, supported by Scripture, Church Fathers and the Reformers themselves.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I want to start by asking you a question. Can you point to a moment in your own life in which you were saved? I hope so. What’s interesting to me is when I ask people when they were saved, nobody’s ever said to me when Jesus died on the cross on Good Friday, and I’m glad that people don’t say that because it shows that Catholics and Protestants agree on something pretty important. The salvation that Jesus won for us on the cross has to be applied somehow in our lives, and that’s what I want to explore today. Why is it that the sacrifice of the mass is the means by which Christ’s blood is applied to us? Why is the mass even necessary if Jesus was crucified for us once for all on Good Friday? Now I’m going to be looking at six different areas.
Number one, the surprising witness of the Protestant reformers. Number two, the Old Testament evidence. Number three, the New Testament evidence. Number four, the witness of the earliest Christians. Number five, the logic of sacrifice. And number six, the nature of worship. Now, two quick things before we get there. First, I’m actually about to debate James White on this very topic. Now by the time you see this, it’ll have already happened. Hopefully it went well. Either way, I’m going to link to it. See if you want the full debate between White and myself, you can get a much longer version on this theme at the very end of this episode. Second, I want to give a huge thanks to my supporters over@shamelessjoe.com. It’s through your direct support. We’ve been able to make so many upgrades to the free weekly videos. You guys have been amazing. People have been fasting and praying for the debate to go well, so it’s an amazing community of people sharing much more than just ideas.
So if you feel so inclined, feel free to join shameless joe.com. Let’s get into it. Number one, the witness of the Protestant reformers to Catholics the mass is what’s called a propitiatory sacrifice. Now, that’s just a technical way of saying that this is a means by which we appease God or appeal to his mercy and we’re reconciled to him. Now, most Protestants today reject this idea. You’ll someone hear people say it’s re crucifying Christ. So it’s kind of controversial, especially in a Protestant country like the us. But if you were to time travel back to the dawn of the Reformation, you wouldn’t find two sides to that debate. Everybody knew that the mass was a propitiatory sacrifice, and you don’t need to take my word for it. Martin Luther complained in the bondage of the will that there is no opinion more generally held or more firmly believed in the church today than this, that the mass is a good work and a sacrifice.
Similarly, the reformer John Calvin complained that Satan had not only obscured and perverted, but altogether obliterated and abolished, vanished away and disappeared from the memory of man the original Lord’s supper. When with most pestilential error, he blinded almost the whole world into the belief that the mass was a sacrifice and ablation for obtaining the remission of sins. So let’s start there. At the dawn of the Reformation, the reformer’s own argument is that everybody on earth is worshiping God falsely. Jesus creates the Lord’s supper. Satan somehow abolishes it and somehow makes all the Christians forget that they supposed to be worshiping God in a different way. He somehow seemingly managed to erase knowledge of this other way of worshiping God from all the annals of history. I want to be very clear. The reformers were not just saying this is a view of some ignorant illiterate Catholic peasants.
Now they’re very clear. This is a view of the theologians and the la alike. Calvin says, the Catholic view of the sacrifice of the mass is not merely the common opinion of the vulgar, but the very act has been so arranged as to be a kind of propitiation by which satisfaction is made to God for the living and the dead. Martin Luther agreed pointing out that the words of the mass themselves speak in unmistakable terms of the sacrificial nature of the mass at the altar. But then he goes on to admit that it’s even more than that. He says, added to these are the sayings of the Holy Fathers. He means the church fathers the great number of examples and the widespread practice uniformly observed throughout the world. I think it’s important to start there because it’s easy for apologists to quote some theologians, some to church father maybe out of context contradicting church teaching on the mass.
And unless you’re an expert you don’t know. Number one was that quotation, a fair representation of that person’s beliefs. And number two, did that person have beliefs that were the norm or were they an outlier? Were they an exception? Were they a heretic in their own day? That can make it really hard to evaluate these questions when objections are raised about the mass. But here we have the reformers telling us explicitly that the expiratory nature of the sacrifice of the masses thing that they reject was the universal opinion of the church everywhere theologians and laity alike. That is found in the prayers that all Christians had been praying every week for ages, and that is reflected in the writings of the church fathers when they admit those things that don’t help their case believe them. Now, if you examine the evidence fairly, I think you’ll come to recognize that the Protestant rejection of the mass is a repudiation of the first 1500 years of Christianity.
It is a branch cut off from its Christian trunk. Now, to see this, you only have to read the reformers themselves, but we can do more than that. Number two, the Old Testament. So you might be wondering why the earliest Christians believed that the Eucharistic liturgy was a true sacrifice. Now the answer is simple. They read that in scripture. They’d seen the Christian priesthood and sacrifice in the New Testament and even foretold in the Old Testament. To keep things simple, I’m going to look at just two passages. The first one is from the last chapter of Isaiah, Isaiah 66. It foretells that in days to come, the Gentiles will become part of the people of God. Verse 21 is the kicker. Speaking of gentile believers, God says through Isaiah, some of them also will take for priests and for Levites says the Lord. Notice God doesn’t say there are no Christian priests or Christ is the only high priest or even all Christians are priests.
He says that some of the Gentile believers will become priests and what is a priest will quite simply, a priest is one who offers sacrifices and priests being the ones with the right and responsibility to offer sacrifice to God goes all the way back to Exodus with what’s called the ironic priesthood aided by the Levites. Now in a second prophecy, now we’re in Malachi chapter one, God, a corrupt Jewish priest for offering impure food sacrifices at the altar of the Lord, which he calls in verse seven, the Lord’s table. We’re going to hear about the table of the Lord later to put a pin in that God then tells these Jewish priests that he’s going to reject their sacrificial offerings, but he’s not going to abolish priestly sacrificial ablations entirely. Instead, he’s going to bring in the nations that is the Gentiles to offer a better sacrifice.
Now, this is Malachi one verses 11 to 12, but from the rising of the sun to its setting, my name is great among the nations that is the Gentiles, 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 the Lord’s table is polluted and the food for it may be despised. So that’s pretty obviously a prophecy of the new covenant. The Gentiles are going to be incorporated into the people of God and some of these new covenant gentiles are depicted in this priestly way offering both incense and a pure offering at the Lord’s table. The language here is unmistakably sacrificial, and we find Christians from the first century forward pointing to passages like these as clear prophecies of the sacrificial nature of the weekly Christian Eucharist.
We’re going to get on that more in a second, number three to the New Testament. So I’m not going to cover the better known passages like John Chapter six or the institution of the Lord’s Supper. Instead, I want to focus on a lesser known passage. This is St. Paul’s Eucharistic discourse. It’s one Corinthians 10 and 11, but in one Corinthians 10 verse 16, Paul says, the cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ, the bread which we break? Is it not a participation in the body of Christ? So that’s the question Paul is posing as it were. How is it that we can participate in the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist? And he starts to answer it in this way because there’s one bread. It actually literally says art on loaf because there’s one loaf.
We who are many are one body for we all partake of the one loaf. In other words, we don’t celebrate the Eucharist because we’re all one body. It’s the other way around. The eucharistic body of Christ is actually what creates the church as a body of Christ. Okay, that then raises another question. Well, how Paul’s answer makes no sense unless you understand the way sacrifices work. I’ll return to the same a bit later, but for now, let us suffice to say this. For certain types of sacrificial offerings, it was not enough that you killed the animal for purposes of communion and expiration. You entered into that by also eating the sacrificial victim. Now we’re going to see a very clear example of that in the Passover lamb, but for now, that’s enough to make sense of what Paul’s about to say. I think because Paul’s going to make a really fascinating threefold comparison.
In first Corinthians 10, verse 18, he says, consider the practices Israel are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar. So how do you create communion? How do you become a partner in the altar by eating the Jewish sacrifice, the one offered at the altar? But then he does something that I find shocking. He compares the Christian Eucharist to pagan sacrifices. He says, what Pagan sacrifice, they offered to demons and not to God, and so he warns the Christians of Corinth. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Now that parallelism is explicit and it’s unavoidable. So what Paul is doing to explain the Eucharist is he’s drawing an overt parallel between the table of demons that is the pagan altars to demonic forces and the table of the Lord.
And as in Malachi one, the table of the Lord isn’t some gathering table. No, it’s the altar which exp expiration is made to God. So according to Paul, this is how you become incorporated into communion with both Jesus ahead and the church his body. Four, the witness of the early Christians. Okay, so how do the early Christians understand passages like the ones I’ve just shown you? I’m going to actually confine myself just to sources from the year 200 or before. This is more than a century before the legalization of Christianity. This is well before the biblical canon is close. This is extremely early on. How did Christians in this period understand these Old Testament passages and their relation to weekly worship? First, let’s look at what’s called the diday. This is a basic kind of catechism explaining the teachings of the 12 apostles. Now, some people believe it’s maybe as late as the year one 50, but others dated as early as sometime in the first century.
So quite possibly this book is actually older than parts of the New Testament itself. And it says this on worship on the Lord’s day of the Lord, come together, break bread and hold Eucharist after confessing your transgressions that your offering may be pure, but let none who has a quarrel with his fellow join in your meeting until they be reconciled that your sacrifice be not defiled. Now, if those allusions to Malachi one weren’t obvious enough, the dedicate then quotes Malachi directly. So the weekly Eucharist is not only the heart of first century Christian worship, it is also understood in explicitly sacrificial terms as that pure sacrifice which had been foretold in the Old Testament St. Justin martyr writing in the mid one hundreds likewise points to the same passage in Malachi one as proof that God anticipating all the sacrifices which we offer through his name and which Jesus to Christ, and joined us to offer IE in the Eucharist of the bread in the cup, and which are presented by Christians in all places throughout the world, bears witness that they are well pleasing to him.
Okay, so too does Saint RNAs of Leon. Now rna, as I’m fond of pointing out every time is the first person in history to tell us that the four gospels are Matthew, mark, Luke, and John. But he also tells us that this Malachi passage shows that the Lord instituted a new ablation that is a presentation or offering to God in the new covenant. And RNAs argues that this eucharistic sacrifice is also the worship spirit and truth that Jesus spoke of in John four. He says that the oblation of the Eucharist is not a carnal one but a spiritual one, and in this respect it is pure and he explains that when the bread and wine are offered to God, we invoke the Holy Spirit that he may exhibit this sacrifice both the bread, the body of Christ and the cup, the blood of Christ, an order that the receivers of these anti types may obtain remission of sins in life eternal.
Now, look, admittedly that passage is a bit dense with the language of typology, but what he’s talking about is this, the bread and wine are being transformed into the body and blood of Christ, and he specifically refers to the reception of the Eucharist as being for the remission of sins and for life, eternal five, the nature of sacrifice. Now at this point I imagine that at least some of you are still clinging to one thread. Sure, the Old Testament and the New Testament, nearly Christians seem to be saying that we should be offering a eucharistic sacrifice to the Lord every week. But doesn’t that violate Hebrews nine, which speaks about Jesus’s sacrifice being once for all? That’s a great question. Another great question would be this. Why didn’t any of the early Christians seem to think of that objection? I’m going to pause it and answer.
They understood the nature of sacrifice better than we do today because whether they be from a Jewish or Gentile background, they came from religions that actually practiced animal sacrifice. So they knew that thing that St. Paul had just kind of casually alluded to in one Corinthians 10, that killing the sacrificial offering isn’t enough for a complete sacrifice. Now, there’s one sacrifice in particular the New Testament points to in order to help us make sense of Christ’s sacrificial death, and that’s the Passover. The Passover liturgy consisted of two aspects, the s slain of the lamb on the 14th day of the month of Nassan. This is sometimes called preparation day and the eating of the lamb on the 15th day of the month. So if you were a Jewish family in the old Covenant and you ate the Passover meal, are you sacrificing the lamb that was killed the day before?
Of course not. The lamb was killed once. It’s never going to get killed again. Instead, you are applying his sacrifice to your life. Now, the Christian parallels here should be obvious, but just in case they’re not, John compares Jesus’ death on good Friday to preparation day in John 19 verse 14. In context, when Hebrews nine speaks of the once for all nature of Jesus’s sacrifice is specifically talking about his suffering and death, it refers to him not suffering repeatedly. The Levitical priest of the old covenant had to kill animals continually, but Jesus comes and saves us by dying only once. Nevertheless, the blood of Jesus does have to be applied. And I think all of you intuit that on some level it’s why you can point to some moment in your life in the 20th or the 21st century in which Christ’s blood was applied to your life.
But how does that work? In other words, if Paul is right, that Christ, our Paschal, meaning Passover lamb has been sacrificed, what happens next? Well, what happened next with the Passover lamb, Exodus 12 tells us directly the blood of the lamb was smeared on the doorpost and they ate the flesh of the lamb. Now, in the old covenant that happened at the Passover meal in the new covenant, Jesus is very explicit about his last supper where he institutes the Eucharist being his Passover. Now, if you listen closely to the Last Supper accounts, this is odd because none of them mentioned Jesus or the disciples eating lamb, and that is literally the central aspect of the Passover sacrificial meal. Instead, the lamb offered in Christ’s sacrifice to be eaten is Jesus Christ himself, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. So when Jesus tells his apostles to do this and remembrance of me, I think we miss two things.
Number one, remembrance. An Amis is sacrificial language and we miss that. Number two, Jesus has just commissioned them to do this, to do a priestly, sacrificial thing by offering the Eucharist at the table of the Lord. So this isn’t a mere, Hey, remember Jesus memorial? Understood in its Jewish and biblical context, this is a liturgical and sacrificial action, no less than the Jewish Passover was. Number six, the nature of worship. The final reason it’s so important that you return to the historic understanding of the nature of the sacrifice of the mass is because it is at the very heart of Christian worship. In the interest of time, I’m going to sketch out this theme only in broad strokes. In the time of Christ, the synagogue was an important place in which people gathered and read scripture, listened to preaching very similar to what you might do in a Protestant church, and that’s good.
We see Jesus doing that weekly in Luke four. But here’s what it’s not. It’s not prayer, and more importantly, it’s not worship. You don’t have to take my word for it. The only time synagogue and prayer are mentioned together in the entire Bible is in Matthew six. When Jesus says not to pray in the synagogue, it’s fine for a Bible study, but it’s not a house of prayer. Bible studies are talking about God, but there’s somewhere else you go to pray, to talk to God. One place is your room really anywhere you can be alone with God, but even that isn’t enough because worship is something distinct from prayer. In the New Testament in John four, when Jesus is speaking to the Samaritan woman, they talk about how the Samaritan think that Mount Gu regime is a place to worship while the Jews think it’s in Jerusalem, meaning in the temple.
So what do Jesus and the Samaritan woman mean by worship? Well, Everett Ferguson, a Protestant scholar who teaches at Abilene Christian University puts it like this, sacrifice was the universal language of worship in the ancient world. Well, they could pray anywhere. Faithful Jews could only offer ritual sacrifices in Jerusalem. Now that old form of sacrifice is transformed in the new covenant. Now, sacrificial worship is offered from the rising of the sun to its setting in Catholic churches around the world, but one thing hasn’t changed. If you’re reading scripture and listening to preaching but not engaged in sacrificial offering, you’re not experiencing what the Bible calls worship. I realize this video may be a tough pill to swallow for some of the Protestants in my audience today, and I’m thankful that you’ve made it all the way through. I invite you to check out the sources I cited for yourself and see what you discover.
Eucharistic liturgy is beautiful, true, ancient, and the most Christian thing we can take part in on earth. Please understand I don’t make this video to mock you or chastise you, rather I make it to invite you to the Lord’s table to join us in his sacrifice. If you want to see more on this theme, hopefully there’s a full length video between James White and myself on the topic right here somewhere. And if you like this video, please drop like maybe a comment, maybe some of your hard earned cash over@shamelessjoe.com. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.
Photo by Josh Applegate on Unsplash