Calling on the Catholic Blogosphere: Support Transubstantiation!
Some of our readers may be familiar with the grad student comic strip, Piled Higher and Deeper (Ph.D.). It a great little spot on the internet for grad students to laugh at themselves. Their latest great idea is the 2 Minute Thesis Contest. Grad students submit a two-minute audio summary of their thesis to be voted on by the public. The winners will get their dissertation cartooned by Jorge of Ph.D. and win a prize package, not to mention publicity for their work.
Part of the running gag at Piled Higher and Deeper is the obscurity of the topics grad students study. Given this, I ask you, “How cool would it be if a dissertation on transubstantiation were to win the contest?”
I have submitted my summary on just this topic! I’d be very obliged to have your vote. Follow the above link to the contest and look for my entry. If you’re having trouble finding it, you can sort alphabetically by field. I am the only Theology entry (another reason to vote for me!).
Furthermore, I am not above shamelessly promoting this. Any Vox Nova reader interested in good eucharistic theology and ecumenical dialogue is heartily encouraged to share this on their own blog and their Facebook feed (and whatever else you can think of).
Much obliged.
Brett
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You have my vote. Are there better words to describe the sacrament?
Thanks for the vote.
Better words than transubstantiation? Well, in a way, yes. If the meaning of the eucharist gets limited to a discussion of transubstantiation, then something has been really lost. “Communion” would be a much better descriptor for the Eucharist than transubstantiation. Same goes for “Eucharist,” which means thanksgiving. On the other hand, transubstantiation does its particular job, i.e., explaining how the claim of Real Presence is not simply incoherent, pretty darn well once you understand it. And I agree with Paul VI in Mysterium Fidae, transignification/transfinalization name an important truth, but this is an explication of transubstantiation, not a replacement of it.
In his book, The Eucharist and Ecumenism, George Hunsinger has made an interesting proposal regarding the term transelementation. This is an ancient term, much more used in the East, which was picked up by several Reformers (Vermigli, Cranmer, Bucer) in the 16th century. Hunsinger, a Presbyterian pastor and theologian at Princeton, argues that, since the Catholic Church does not reject Eastern articulations, Protestants could take up transelementation (esp. since it is there right at the beginning of their own heritage) as a way to enhance their own understanding and become more ecumenically viable, without rejecting their own heritage.
That’s great! I voted! (for you, of course!)
Thanks!
When I was an editor of my high school newspaper, there was a Christian Brother, a teacher at the school, who was our adviser and was also writing a religion textbook for use by the Christian Brothers. We used to pepper him with all kinds of questions and argue with him. One of our questions was whether wood, transubstantiated to gold, should sell for the price of wood or for the price of gold.
Is transubstantiation, in theory at least, possible for elements other than bread and wine? If plutonium were transubstantiated into iron, it would still cause a nuclear explosion if substituted for plutonium in a fission bomb, it would still be radioactive, and it would still be poisonous. But if transubstantiation is theoretically possible for anything other than bread and wine, how can we ever be sure what is really plutonium and what is iron, and would it actually be meaningful to say plutonium is plutonium and iron is iron. How would we know? What makes a thing what it is?
If you give a good answer, I will vote for you. :P
Ok, David. I’ll give it my best shot!
It should sell for the price of wood because the price is based on what you can actually do with something, and anything that has been transubstantiated still does what it did before. That’s part of the definition. If we couldn’t eat the consecrated bread and wine, they wouldn’t be much good to us.
More seriously, though, you couldn’t actually transubstantiate wood into gold. Wood and gold are two of the same kinds of thing. In one sense the body and blood of Christ are the same kind of thing as bread and wine, i.e., material realities, but in a very important sense they are not. First of all, Christ’s body and blood are eschatologically realized material realities. St. Paul calls the resurrected body a spiritual body. Such a body need not be present in the same way as material realities in order to be really present (as the resurrection appearances indicate). Second, they are personalized material realities. Bread does not have a rational soul and does not have an eternal destiny. Therefore it can become something else and cease existing, whereas human bodies, eschatologically speaking anyways, can not. Our profession of belief in the resurrection of the body means that we think our bodies, and prototypically, primordially Christ’s body, do have eternal destinies. Third, this particular body, Christ’s body, is united to the second person of the Trinity, the Word through whom God created the world.
Thomas Aquinas has a very important, but generally overlooked, line in the Summa where he says that transubstantiation happens by means of God taking away what kept this from being that. In other words, transubstantiation reveals something at the heart of all creation. Gold isn’t at the heart of wood, the way Christ is at the heart of, not just bread and wine, but all of creation.
So, to answer your question, yes things other than bread and wine could be transubstantiated, at least theoretically speaking. But the issue is on the other end of the equation. The only thing that anything can be transubstantiated into is Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, he who is at the very heart of creation and to whom all will be submitted so that God may be all in all. The whole of creation is to become Christ’s body, starting with the Eucharist and, through the Eucharist, the Church (also called the body of Christ, nb), and, through the Church, the world.
One last thing: the only worldview in which transubstantiation can make any sense at all is one determined by a Christian doctrine of creation. In such a worldview things are what they are because God determined them by his Word. That is why transubstantiation is so linked with an emphasis on the words of institution. Christ, the Word through whom God made the universe, can determine reality with his words at the deepest level (hence, in persona Christi). If things are what they are only because of human convention, etc. transubstantiation becomes incoherent. An entire realist metaphysics undergirds transubstantiation, which is part of the reason the Church is so strongly invested in the doctrine. It insists on a worldview that is necessary for the coherence of much of Christian faith and doctrine.
How’s that? Do I get a vote?
PS. My most important sources on this are F.X. Durrwell’s Eucharist: Presence of Christ, a brilliant little book I can’t recommend too highly, and an old article on transubstantiation that Ratzinger wrote in the 60s that should be available in English this fall.
I am going to steal this (with proper attribution, of course) and use it whenever transubstantiation comes up. Brilliant.
Thanks Ryan. I wonder if David liked it.
You more than earned my vote (number 343)! I have never read an explanation quite like that before. What I really love about Vox Nova (as compared to, say F_rst Th_ngs) is that when you ask a question, instead of being denounced or ganged up on, you often get an answer and/or a book recommendation.
On the downside, there appears to be only one copy of the book available for sale in the entire world, and although Amazon is offering it with free shipping, the price is $399.
Your best bet is a theological library. I got my copy through Loome Books in Minnesota. (Looks like they have a version in French right now. Comment est ton francais?) I put in a request that they kept on file. Twice it was about to expire and I renewed it. Finally they got a copy for me. Sounds like I should recommend it as an academic reprint to Wipf and Stock.
https://www.loomebooks.com/index.cfm?
The Ratzinger article is due to be published in a collected volume of Ratzinger’s early work due out this fall from Ignatius.
Actually, looking again at the subtitle and the page count, that appears to be a different book.
This actually makes me very happy! Thanks David! (Ach, this was in response to your first comment, though it somehow ended up at the bottom.)
I voted for you at the cost of “great” personal sacrifice: the website ended up crashing my browser.
Yeah, really clunky site. Locked everything up. Nevertheless, you got my vote, and by the looks of it you’re the runaway winner!
Actually I’m in second. But we’re gaining!