All Articles For Contending for the Faith

According to the Fathers  Before we continue with our treatment of the truth of divine inspiration as set forth in the Reformed Confessions, we wish to call attention to this doctrine as set forth by the Fathers of the early Christian Church (the church during the early years of the New Dispensation). 

765. It is absurd to say that Christ’s body and blood can be in a wafer made by nuns from flour and water. 

At the conclusion of our preceding article the Romish Fathers Rumble and Carty were confronted by the Scriptural expressions that Christ is the door and also the vine. We will recall that Rome contends that the Scriptural passage: “This is My body,” must be understood in the natural sense of the word. The meaning is that the bread of Communion has actually become the body of the Lord.

According to the Fathers (continued)  We do not find too much on the doctrine of the divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures in the writings of the early Church Fathers; at least, the undersigned could not find many writers who wrote on this subject. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that the truth of divine inspiration was generally accepted. We concluded our preceding article by quoting from Origen. 

Quoting from the Radio Replies by the Fathers Rumble and Carty, we concluded our preceding article with Question and Answer 779 of Volume II, whether in Communion the Trinity was received or only the Second Person. And the answer was that, in the Romish conception, the people receive not only the Second Person but also the Trinity. And now we continue with these replies.  780. What relation arises between the soul of the communicant and the First and Third Persons of the Trinity? 

We concluded our preceding article with the observation that the North African Church revealed rather clear tendencies toward what is called the Reformed view of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Among the leaders of the North African Church are men as Origin, Clement, Tertullian, and Cyprian. Origin, it is claimed, is the only one among the Ante Nicene Fathers (the Fathers prior to the Council of Nicaea, 325) who decidedly opposes those who take the external sign in the Eucharist for the thing itself.

The sacrifice constitutes an essential element today in the Roman Catholic doctrine of the mass. The Romish Church distinguishes between the Mass and the Eucharist. The bass precedes the Eucharist and is, of course, necessary for it. There can be no Eucharist, no partaking of the body and blood of Christ and of thanksgiving to God without the Mass. In the Mass the bread and wine aye actually changed into the body and blood of the Lord through the intercession of the priest, and the body and blood of the Lord are really offered by the Church.

The Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, that the communicants eat and drink the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ under and with the bread and wine, is largely based upon the omnipresence of our Lord Jesus Christ, the omnipresence of His body and blood and the omnipotence of God. The Lutherans contend that it is a fearful thing to say and hear that God, even with all His omnipotence, cannot effect the body of Christ to be present substantially at one and the same time in more places than one.

In our preceding article we called attention to the Reformed view of the church with respect to the church’s visibility and invisibility. This Reformed position identifies the church invisible with the elect and the church visible with the appearance of the church in the midst of the world as consisting of both elect and reprobate. This view, we noted, is maintained by both Ursinus and Calvin. The church, therefore, could be called invisible in a three-fold sense of the word. First, the church is invisible as the church universal, because one person cannot discern or see the church as it...

In our preceding article, discussing the Lutheran view of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we were criticizing this conception of consubstantiation. The Lutherans believe that the body of Christ is present at the Lord’s Supper exactly because it is everywhere present. We now continue with our criticism of this conception.