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Had hand surgery hard to type with one hand be back soon

Desiderant Angeli: The Disturbing Legacy of Charles Finney

Desiderant Angeli: The Disturbing Legacy of Charles Finney

Great post on Finney and why he was not a Christian

Eat the Media Too

So tonight I am watching the news and they are talking about a recall for Johnson and Johnson products including some of the ones my kids take. So I listened up. As the story unfolded they showed footage of people from J&J before a bunch of really important looking Congress folks and laid out this scenario as though any second now J&J might be going under because of the flood of injured and dead children having taken their products.

Then the story said that no one had been killed.

No one had been injured.

No one had been sick.

There was a mention about a possible bacteria contamination in some products but no evidence that anyone had been sick from that either.

So I had to ask, "Why is this news?" While it is true that Tylenol and Motrin, like all NSAIDS (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) if taken for too long will contribute to kidney, liver problems and the like. I learned this when my mom died of kidney failure after a life time of chronic pain, but she took a very high dose of these drugs each and every day to manage her pain and have something resembling a normal life. So I am hard pressed to see the tragedy here.

Of course no one should give their child these medications like candy and certainly not above the recommended dosage, but I learned that by reading the label on the drugs before giving them to my children. Of course expecting people to actually read warning labels is a bit of an imposition on their rights, but hey since they haven't invented talking pill bottles yet I don';t really know what to do for that.

So why the big stink?

Well two reasons.

One, we live in a media culture and scandal sells really well to the viewing masses. Of course the hand wringing reporter on TV does not give a rip roaring snot about the children but they understand that if they wring their hands and make you care about the children then they will get better ratings, sell more advertising, and get to keep their jobs. Its a business in the news and therefore, although there may be nothing to report, corporate scandal is a big deal and the media will fabricate one out of thin air if they have to to keep us watching watching watching.

Two, we live in a litigious culture. We have all bought into the myth that if we can just get a sympathetic jury we can hit the lawsuit lottery and live happily ever after. We don't really trouble ourselves with whether or not this is right because after all, hey they got a lot of money and in the American Spirit of egalitarianism and free money for all, they should give some to me because they have more than me.

Don''t believe it?

Toyota anyone?

By this time Toyota has removed millions of acceleration modules from their vehicles to be inspected by their scientists as well as NHTSA's scientists and to date exactly not one part has been found defective. Not even in those vehicles which had acceleration accidents. In fact the evidence suggests that what actually happened was that these folks had their floor mats caught on the accelerator and panicked. It seems cold to say so, but human error is the much more likely explanation and the reason why is simple.

The general idea is that there is a software problem on these modules which causes the accidents. The problem with that is that if there were a software problem there would not have been about twenty incidents out of some four million vehicles, but rather four million incidents. The reason why is that the fly by wire system that Toyota uses controls the acceleration, not by how hard you push the pedal, but by how hard they computer thinks you pushed the pedal. If the software were defective, then the computer would misinterpret the data in each car in which said software was extant. However that has not been the case. In fact the extreme lack of commonness of these incidents indicates not that the trouble is hard to find in the software, but that a software problem does not exist.

But what about those poor suffering people who are left behind after the accidents?

Well what about them?

The simple fact that someone is hurting is not reason why that someone should receive a king's ransom from a company simply because that company had money. But to here the commercials soliciting people to come and sue Toyota on the radio you would never know it.

The point is that if you take too many nsaids and die it your fault. If you fail to put your floor mats back in correctly and die, its your fault. And if it is your fault, your existing folks left behind do not deserve money for your failure.

But the problem is that since we like corporate scandal and are conditioned to believe that corporations are evil we think it is OK to punish them whether they deserve it or not. And the problem with that is that when corporations do something which is grievous, we have a hard time determining that based on the many spectacular but frivolous stories being circulated by the media hoping for a sale.

Just thinking.

We Must Eat the Right to Save Civilization

For several years now there have been long loud complaints that our educational system is educating our children into imbecility. That left leaning professors offering an atheistic, post-modern, humanist, existential, deconstructionist historical perspective were turning out children who held degrees but failed to believe in, not God, but truth. Or at least the knowability of truth. Such graduates then went into the real world where they were compelled to make honest left-right. up-down, this-that decisions and being totally unprepared to do so they made a hash of it to say the least. It even went so far that a certain chief executive challenged what a questioner could mean by the word, "is".

This of course really is post-modernism run amok. The idea that truth is unknowable in any final sense and language is useless to help us discern it has never been more on display. And, happily, people had a visceral reaction to this shining example of intelligent inanity that sent them screaming over the edge as they asked, "Is this guy serious?"

The problem is that this reaction was short lived because while most people understood that the CEO had just uttered an absurdity, they could not say why. After all even the most ardent of nay-sayers to this statement would still comfortably say things like, "Well that's true for you..." when it was their opinion in dispute.

This is true even today, and if you don't believe it then I have a science experiment for you. The next time someone argues with you about something you say ask this simple question, "Well, do you think I am wrong?" and watch as they fumble all over themselves with the fact that yes they do think you are wrong but do not want to say so because they do not wish to offend you and they don't really know for sure if they have a leg to stand on if they do say so. Rather what they believe, at least intellectually if not actually, is that the truth which they propound has more truthiness than your truth and therefore should be believed. And if you doubt me on this, then wait and see if they something like, "Well... I did't say that..." or some gibberish of that sort, and then see what happens when you say, "The reason I ask is that I think you are wrong." By the way, I would recommend you be pretty thick skinned before trying this because your average post-modern soaked academician will at this point have a melt down which would make the 'China Syndrome' look like warmed over coffee.

The point is that we live today in an America which actually has been overthrown by post-modern thinkers who don't believe anything and expect us to believe that is right, but are not prepared to give us one single reason why. While at the same time peacefully at night they rest in the sleep of the strong certain that they have enough sycophantic jabber-jaws around them so that they may feel secure in the ocean of absurdity that the halls of higher thought have become.

Really.

That is why news media is now no longer concerned with telling both side of a story, or even the truth, but rather in shaping the news so that those who consume it will feel safe in their presumptions never once daring to hear someone who may disagree with them. Of course they may think they have because the person they listen to talks about people who disagree, but does so in a way as to shape what has been said and to lampoon dissenting opinion to protect the thoughtless sleeper from ever being roused from his lethargy of group think.

It is the same reason that news shows have become either celebrity scandal mongers or tsk tsk human interest shows which are aimed at pulling your heart strings while never telling you one damn thing.

The same reason that bookstores now divide the political aisles into left and right leaning authors so as not to have to put up with complaints from those disconcerted loud talkers who accidentally read a book jacket which broke a cobweb somewhere deep down inside.

Oddly enough the same is not true of the Christian section but the Christian Right knows nothing about Christianity and therefore this, while funny, is not terribly surprising.

And in the latest and greatest example of this herd sheltering phenomenon the Texas Board of Education has bowed out to public outrage and written Thomas Jefferson (ya know as in the) back into the history books even though he was not a Christian and believed in church state separation.

Really. I could not make this up.

Here's the thing. Down here in the land of illiterate rednecks we likes our edumication to teach that Reagan was the greatest pres-o-dint ever and ALL ABSOLUTELY ALL ALL ALL ALL ALL of our fore fathers were Christians. That this country was founded on Christian principles by Christian men who never sinned or told lies and those men gave us (wipe the tear from your eye here) the greatest country on God's Green Earth. And we hates us some ni... uh... je... uh... liberals, yeah that's it, liberals teaching our yung unns anything what says differ'nt. Thems all commies, fags, muzlums and democrats and we ain't tolleratiin their ilk round bout here.

See! If someone wrote it as fiction no one would believe it, but thanks to the thinkers in the world Thomas Jefferson is no longer fit for consumption by Texas school children.

Why?

Simple. You see since the founding fathers all have to be Christian, and since Christianity is a theist religion (theism is the belief that God not only creates but sovereignly rule over his creation nano-second by nano-second a belief most Christians no longer hold to btw) a document like umm.... I dunno.... The Declaration of Independence which says "When in the course of human events... and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the LAWS OF NATURE AND NATURE'S GOD ENTITLE THEM..." cannot possibly be a Christian document because it ascribes the source of Law as being nature and not God. This is Deism which is the belief that God is a cosmic watchmaker who wound it all up and let it run its course. Of course many so-called Christians believe this is just what happened, but to persist in this belief is to be outside the realm of orthodoxy, and in so doing be no more a Christian than Jefferson was. That coupled with the whole messy separation of church and state thing that Jefferson wrote about along with his belief that Religion would die as men's rationality progressed just pee all over the idea that he was a Christian.

So if you're Texas and you are more interested in the Myth of America than history and are more interested in thinking rightly than in right thinking (seig heil) then you need to do away with messy and inconvenient fact.

So old Tom had to go, but thanks to the outrageous level of stupidity that this decision clearly outlines dogma has given way to protest and Tom gets to stay.

But the simple fact that Texas could even think of doing this scares me something awful. As well as (insert interlocutor here) those who will say, "Well the Liberals do it!" Yes of course the only way to deal with people who you think are wrong is to sink to their level. The difference is no liberal would say that the Declaration is not a paramount achievement of human effort no matter if they disagree with John Witherspoon having signed it or not, and they would never think of disallowing Jefferson's inclusion in the history books because he.... say, owned slaves for example. The personal foibles of great men do not disallow their inclusion in the historical narrative for historical feats.

Here are some other conservative values the Right does not embrace.

1. The government does not have the right to legalize religion any more than it can make it illegal.

2. The government does not have the right to say that consenting adults cannot get married.

3. If your state wants to tax you, it is not the federal government's problem.

4. If your federal taxes are too high it is not your states problem.

5. A respect of law demands you not secede from the union but rather participate in it.

6. It is up to you and your local community to outlaw abortion and not for a judge to overturn Roe.

7. The army is not the solution to your problems.

8. Southern Asian people blowing each other up and spilling over wars which endanger the oil supply is tough luck for the consumers and not the problem of the government.

9. You must pay your taxes even if you don't want to.

10. Jesus wants you to pay your taxes.

11. Gun toting beauty queens do not make good presidents even if they are babes.

12. God is everybody's God and who goes to Heaven is up to Him.

13. It might not be you or your preacher.

14. Jesus really does want you to pay your taxes.

15. So does Paul.

16. So does Peter.

17. A theocracy is not a conservative form of government it is fascism.

18. If you want to live in a theocracy move to Iran.

19. Not everybody believes in Jesus.

20. The government cannot legislate that everyone believe in Jesus.

21. Stop losing your mind over a cross in California you have never even seen.

22. Since you don't bother to obey the Ten Commandments stop shrieking every time someone wants them removed from a court house.

23. If you want religion taught in school send your kids to a Catholic academy.

24. Or a Muslim school.

25. If you are going to defend the Bible, read it.

AND FINALLY

Thomas Jefferson is one of the greatest Americans who ever lived and he was not a Christian...

Neither was Franklin...

So get over it.

Just thinking.

Too Funny

So I'm messing with my blog this morning and I realized that it listed my age as 1936. So I thought, "That's weird?" So I checked out my birthday 5/16/73. Then I checked the formating and realized that by putting in /73 the blog site thought I meant... 73 as in AD73. Ya know three years after Titus sacked Jerusalem. So just in case you were wondering I am not in fact immortal and neither am I really almost 2000 years old.

But I thought it was funny nonetheless.

The Myth of Illegal Immigration

Cheery Theme Music

Come one come all to your favorite place in the whole wide world. That's right kiddies its Uncle Bogey Subversive Tree House.

So kiddies come on in to Uncle Bogey's House and lets talk about the favorite myth of the scared middle class white man. What's that Timmy? No this is not the one about the darkies not knowing their place... well OK it sort of is, but these are a different type of darkies and even though no one admits it this particular stripe of bigotry is still considered a virtue by most Americans. What? No Suzy I'm not talking about the G-A-Y's either, but good point.

OK.

Sit down and Uncle Bogey will tell you a story.

Once upon a time... in a magical land called America there were lots of places to live and lots of good jobs to be had and everyone was so so friendly that everyone the whole world over was welcome. In fact there was so much opportunity that African people, the Negroes, volunteered to cram themselves into ships and make a really dangerous ocean crossing just to come here. And do you know what? When they got here. they liked it so much that they volunteered to work for free. So America grew and grew because of an endless supply of cheap labor which allowed us to sell finished textiles the world over for much cheaper than they could be had anywhere else.

Our fore fathers, being the wise and benevolent men they were, recognized that this was so important that when they had won their freedom against bad bad bad england who wanted them to pay taxes (gasp) that they wrote it into our Constitution that the our Negro friends would be allowed to work here for free... forever. And for one hundred years no one complained, except the Indians but they didn't want to share their land with ranchers so the wise and benevolent fore fathers had them shot (applause). The problem was, that after four hundred years some people began to think that it was wrong to allow our Negro friends to continue to work for free so the Northern Americans and the Southern Americans, after a small disagreement, decided that we shouldn't do that anymore.

What Mikey?

Now that the Negroes were free how did we welcome them into regular society?

Well to make them feel special we gave them separate schools and a separate part of town and drinking fountains to use for another one hundred years. How do we welcome them now? Well now we have what is called government assistance which guarantee they will all live together and not bother upper middle class people with their needs.

But Uncle Bogey is getting sidetracked.

After the "Big Talk" between the North and South now corporations who wanted to build to things like railroads and wanted to run their businesses like meat packing plants and textiles, had to find a way to protect their profit margin... I mean if they wanted to keep the cheap prices that they provided these things to their customers with, they needed another group of volunteers to help them.

So they turned to Eastern Europeans and Irishmen (Timmy that is a bad word and will not be repeated again) and Chinese People and Italian People who all wanted to come here to work side by side with their children in the factories and coal mines of America as our economy grew and grew. And these new people instantly and totally assimilated into American culture and we know this because today the places they lived like Chinatown and Hell's Kitchen and Little Italy are famous paces that tourists like to go. In these places the first generation of people off the boats totally accepted American Culture and learned to speak English without an accent and they forgot all about their old culture which can still be experienced even today in New York and San Francisco.

Eventually though some people got together with the communists and outlawed child labor, canyou believe that? And made it illegal for the meat packing, coal mining, ranching, textile industries to work this new cheap labor to death because they had assimilated and spoke English and we didn't think of them as different anymore.

And now corporations had to find new cheap labor, but this time they didn't look across the ocean they looked to our good friend Mexico and invited a whole new generation of volunteers to help come build the American Dream of cheap houses and cheap clothes and cheap services. And do you know what, they didn't even try to become legal so that they could have fair and equal protection under the law. No sir! In fact our good friends the corporations have continued to underpay our Mexican friends and worked them in unsafe conditions so that our finished products won't cost us as much. Isn't that wonderful? (Applause)

But there is a problem.

It seems that now just like before there are few trouble makers who have decided this kind of thing is wrong. That it is wrong to pay someone less that minimum wage for a dangerous job. That it is wrong to make our friends work harder for longer hours with no access to legal channels of complaint concerning employment abuses. That it is wrong to allow corporations to lay off American workers and hire contractors to bid out jobs at wages so low they must hire our Mexican friends. And these bad people are trying to break the American Dream of unbridled success with fat bellies and profits for all.

So what are we going to do about? No Alice we can't kill them... yet.

No instead we're going to empower law enforcement to stop anyone who looks like a Mexican friend and if he can't prove he's an American then we will arrest him and send him back to Mexico. Once we start doing that those few American Dream haters will become so afraid that they will no longer speak up for human rights and human dignity and then our economy will turn around and God will be happy. And isn't that what you want? (Applause)

Roll Credits.

Just in case you missed the point, there has never in history been a single solitary group of immigrants who have come to this country and immediately assimilated. This is a myth. It is a myth propounded by bigots who want cheap products but not the inconvenience of broken English. This myth is told by corporate media which is owned by powerful corporate interests who assure that laws remain as they are so the disfranchisement of a huge under payed under represented group of our population will continue in perpetuity. These corporations know perfectly well that they could legal wages but they also know that Americans would rather have cheap goods than human rights so the next time the poor girl and Fat Ass incorporated gets the triple cheeseburger order wrong, its your fault that she is there so stop yelling at her. And they next time you bitch that someone doesn't speak the language, remember you don't speak Cherokee.

This myth exists to ensure that people will continue to be abused and denied access to the systems of law and justice which should protect all people in our nation. That is what it means to be America.

And to allow this is an offense against man and God.

Make readily available green cards to all who want to work here and take away the tax licenses of any employer or corporation who employs a contractors who employs illegal immigrants and the problem will be solved overnight. Slavery is never ended by punishing the slaves, it is ended by outlawing the practice and punishing the slave owners.

Just thinking.

The Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

Before I begin, there is a lot of animosity built up between Roman Catholics and Protestants of all stripes and I think this is supremely unhelpful in nearly every way. In example I no more believe that every Catholic is going to hell anymore than I believe that every pick-your-denominational-flavor believer is going to Heaven. It is God's Heaven and He will save whom He wills to save and none other. As such this is not a diatribe against the Catholics but is rather the outflowing of a meditation on the presence of Christ in the Lord's Table which I have been considering for some time. So please any desirous to play kick the Catholic please go somewhere else, and those who think I am playing kick the Catholic please know this about a disagreement that I personally hold with the Mother Church concerning one doctrine and has nothing whatever to do with my feeling about the Catholic Believers themselves.

In the Catholic Mass the priest says the Prayer of Consecration by which he dedicates the host (the Eucharist or the bread of the Lord's Supper) in so doing he changes the substance of the bread to the body of Christ. As in the actual flesh of Christ. The means of which is that all material things (so says Thomas Aquinas) have two different sets of attributes. 1) their accidents which are the physical visible properties and 2) their substance which is the underlying nature of the thing. For example if I say "ball" you will probably think of something spherical with various other properties which comprise the idea you have of "ball". You don't know exactly what I mean by "ball" but you more or less have an idea. The idea, so says some philosophers, stems from a universal ideal of "ball-ness". Therefore any and all balls would have a general participation in this "ball-ness" that is they possess the substance of "ball". It is the individual accidents which differentiate basketball, football, baseball, and soccer ball.

So?

Well the notion in Catholic Theology is that the host, which the Church prescribes is made of water, flour and salt, has the accidents of bread and the substance of bread, but when the priest, who has received Holy Orders and thus been empowered to do so by Mother Church, says the Prayer of Consecration the Holy Spirit effects what is called the Transubstantiation. That is to say God in response to the prayer of the priest changes the substance of the bread from bread to the Body of Christ while the accidents remain unchanged. So the Host would therefore still look like bread, feel like bread and taste like bread, but would now possess the substance of the Body of Christ.

And....

This doctrine comes from the Gospels when at the Last Supper the Lord breaks the bread and tells the Apostles, "This is my body which is broken for you...." Therefore, Rome maintains, that in order to have received the true Eucharist you must actually eat the Body of Christ, since that is what the Lord said, and the only way to do this is too receive it from the hand of a rightfully ordained Priest.

So what is the problem?

Well there are a lot of them. Among them are questions concerning Church Authority, the Authority of the Pope and by extension the Priesthood, the necessity of repeating the sacrifice etc, but here I want to focus on the one question of, "Can we have the presence of Christ without the Transubstantiation?", and, "Is the Transubstantiation a true and valid religious rite?"

The second question first.

I think the single most forceful argument against the Transubstantiation was offered by John Calvin. He argued that the Transubstantiation was invalid not because of its reliance on Aristotelian Philosophy but because the Doctrine does violence to the Church's own teaching. Namely as it concerns the Council of Chalcedon. For those of you have attended a confessional church in your life you have probably at some point stood with the congregation and said something which included the statement about Jesus that He was "fully man and fully God". The Council of Chalcedon affirmed this belief. The bishops at the council repudiated the idea that Christ had only one nature, that is to say His nature was only that of God. Earlier the Church had repudiated the idea that Christ had somehow become God after having ascended to it (the Arian Heresy which Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses teach to this day) at the Council of Nicea and at Chalcedon they repudiated the monophysite heresy which held that Christ's human nature was less than human in some way.

In so doing the Church affirmed that the two natures of Christ existed fully, without confusion or mixture. That they were distinct and existed in one person. In other words, Christ pertaining to His humanity was a man. He was born in a very normal fashion, grew up, learned things, became a man of wisdom and stature, learned and obeyed the Law, ate slept and even pooped. He bled real blood, suffered real pain and died a real death at Calvary and rose in a real body in which He will come again. Concerning His humanity He has all of the properties of the Deity. He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent and did not divest Himself of these in any fashion in order to become man. After all to do so would make Him less than God which would mean that He was God and not God in the same way and at the same time.

And here was Calvin's argument. Since Christ had a human and divine nature and holds them both without mixture or confusion, then that means that the properties of one cannot belong to the other. That is the Omnipresent Son when He was walking the streets of Jerusalem in His flesh could not also be walking the streets of Bethlehem; that His divine presence did not and does not negate His human body's physical properties. And here is where Rome tripped on herself concerning this doctrine. Each day 365 days a year the Roman Catholic Church performs the Mass. At the Mass the Transubstantiation takes place. In other words each and every day Rome's doctrine holds that the Body of Christ, that is His flesh, takes the omnipresent nature of God because any Mass held at the same time in two different places would demand that Christ bodily be present in two places at the same time. In other words Rome blends the natures of Christ by this doctrine and in so doing sets aside her own doctrine in favor of her practice. For this and no other reason, though there are many (how can man offer to God the person of Christ, and do so repeatedly which just so happens to offend the text of Scripture... Hebrews) this one argument I think throws the practice out as any legitimate Religious rite.

So where is the rub? Surely the practice being invalid means that the Supper is itself a symbol and naught else.

The problem is the words of Christ. Jesus plainly declares to the Apostles, "Take and eat this is my body do this in remembrance of me." There are those who would like to argue that since the Apostles understood that they were not actually eating the flesh of Christ that we can imply the symbolism of the Supper, but the issue is that if Jesus had wanted to say, "This is like my body" He could have, but He did not. The Gospels and Paul all record that Jesus said the bread is His Body and the wine is His blood, and this is no invention of later years as we know because the Church from her earliest days offended Roman culture because they were accused of being cannibals because they ate someone's flesh and drank their blood.

So if the Supper is no mere symbol and neither do we call down the flesh Christ to be daily broken on the altar then what do we do with this simple declaration, "This is my body."

I think the answer is found in two things. One the Passover and two the other sacraments.

Again we'll start with the latter. St Augustine when he was writing concerning the Donatist Controversy (certain Christians, the followers of Donatus oddly enough, argued that any sacrament administered by a priest who then back slid and renounced the Faith in the face of persecution would be invalid because the Priest or Bishop had invalidated himself) argued that the faithfulness of the priest was not the determinate factor in the efficacy of the Sacrament, but rather the Holy Spirit's attendant mercy is that which validated the sacrament, after all if the validity of baptism or marriage or the Lord's Table depended on the sinlessness of any man priest or not we would all be firmly up the creek.

So Augustine argued that the Sacraments were made real by the Spirit. For example in Baptism we are symbolically buried with Christ. But Christ was in the ground three days, and certainly the Church does not require us to hold our breath for three days so the Sacrament represents the participation in the death and burial of Christ. But if Baptism is merely a symbol then would an atheist also receive the benefits of Baptism? Certainly not. Because baptism is a symbol but not merely one. That is the Baptism is only real if it is administered to a believer in Christ. But any Joe can say he is a Christian and we have very limited means to know whether or not it is so, but God knows. And so in a mysterious way the Holy Spirit attends the Baptism of the saved and effects the reality of the participation in the death and burial of Christ. So in a sense the Baptism is a sign and yet it is a reality. Plainly spoken, a person can attend Church daily, go through all the religious rigmarole and still go to Hell because he does not have the Grace of Salvation. It is only the Grace of the Holy Spirit which makes a man's religion real and it is therefore the work of God which validates the faith and practice of the faithful.

A quick aside. R. C. Sproul very astutely pointed out that orthodox believers have a tendency to think of the Grace of God as though it were something which came in a box with a bow on top. Not so, the Grace of God is the presence of God, therefore those to whom Grace has been given have received from God, God Himself. As such when Grace of God attends a sacrament God is there.

Now onto the Lord's Table and the tricky phrase.

I think the first thing we must do when considering the Lord Table is remember that this is a distinctly Jewish observation. Namely the observation of the Passover. When Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper He was eating the Passover with the Apostles. So what is the Passover? It was a yearly celebration commemorating the Exodus from Egypt when the Israelites sacrificed a lamb and put its blood on the door posts and ate the lamb and bitter herbs within so that the Angel of Death would not strike their houses as He passed through Egypt. A pretty simple command really, "Do this or I will kill you." So for the first participants in Egypt the Passover was not symbol at all, but a very present reality which promised immediate and total disaster for those who did not obey.

But what about those who kept the Passover, say, in the time of King David? If they did not keep the Feast would the Death Angel strike their households and slay their firstborn? No. It was a symbol kept in remembrance that God had delivered them from Egypt. So those who ate the Lamb were not actually eating the Passover Lamb as their Fathers had in Egypt, but they were participating in the deliverance of their fathers by eating a lamb. So there was a sense of really eating the Lamb at Passover as they remembered what God had done. But were all of those who participated year in year out true adherents to the Faith of God. No. We know because God tells the Prophets (Isaiah and Amos immediately come to mind) that He hates the festivals and new moons in which the people participated because they did so without faith. The clear message is that while perhaps a great many people took part in the Passover those who did so without faith received no benefit from it. That is only the faithful experienced the reality of eating the Passover Lamb when they ate a lamb at the Passover.

So what happened at the Lord's Table? Jesus ate the Passover with the Apostles (although we know for certain that at least Judas received no benefit from it) and as He did so He changed the Liturgy of the ceremony. Instead of eating the Lamb He told the Apostles to take and eat the Bread which was His Body and drink the Cup which was His Blood, and they were to do this in perpetuity until they drank the Cup with Him in Paradise. So did they literally eat the Body of Christ? I think the answer depends on what is meant by "literally". I think the first question to be asked is, "Did all the Apostles receive the same meal?" Again considering Judas I think the answer is clearly no. There were those who received the symbol in faith and received the full grace of the presence of Christ as they ate and others who did not, as such can it really be said that they all literally ate the same meal? Again I think the answer is no.

So from the very beginning of the Table there is a sense in which there is a reality beyond the physical which takes place at the meal. But then we must consider what followed. After Jesus had eaten the meal and changed the liturgy He then went to the Cross and died and became the all sufficient Lamb for the faithful thus paying in full the price of their debt. And now instead of the Death Angel coming and slaying the first born of the faithless Egyptians He instead laid hold of the Firstborn of God Almighty and drove stakes into Him on a Roman gibbet thus fulfilling the future to which the Passover of old had pointed.

But now a new Liturgy of the Passover had been given and now those who would take of it would participate not in the temporal salvation out of slavery from the Egyptians, but from the permanent and once for all salvation out of sin and death which those who are Christ's find in Him. Now instead of eating a Lamb in faith, we eat the Lamb in faith. Not because of a priest, but because we offer ourselves as living sacrifice wholly acceptable to Him and in so doing we partake of His suffering because He attends our taking of the sacrament. It is as though we are receiving the bread from His hand as surely as the Apostles did. When Christ gives us grace to come to His Table He is giving us His presence as we eat the bread remembering, as the Israelites did, the escape from slavery, and looking forward, as the Israelites did, not to the Lamb who is to come but to the Lamb who will return and eat this meal with us in Paradise.

In the same way we now take the Cup. We no longer take the bitter herbs to remind us of the bitterness of Slavery and the price paid for our freedom, but rather we take the cup to remember the Blood of the Lamb poured out at the Altar of the Cross remembering that Jesus drank the bitterness of the Cup of God's wrath to its dregs that we may drink the sweet wine of the River of Life in Paradise with Him. And those who do so in faith take that Cup from the Hand of God who gives it to them in Grace and says "Take and drink and remember what I did for you." Looking back to the bitterness of our slavery and the bitterness of the Cross and looking forward to the sweetness of hearing Him say, "Well done good and faithful servant."

So we have no need to invoke a priestly prayer to change the substance of bread and wine, as if that were possible, to have the presence of Christ at His Table. This is the crudest of understandings of what it means to be with God. It is to say that the only way God can commune with us is by actually placing Himself into our hands as though His presence is not real if I cannot personally physically touch Him.

No. And again no.

Rather the faithful enters into the presence of Christ at the Table not because a Priest has called God down but because Christ has called us up, and at His table we look forward to the Table where we will have the pleasure of His person forever more. And we need no earthly sign to know that having accepted the bread from His hand we have accepted Him. And we need no religious rites to know that having drunk of His cup of suffering we have drunk of Him. So let us find pleasure not in the things we can see touch and taste, but rather in the One who gives them to us and says,"All who are weary come unto me, for my burden is easy and my yoke is light." Let us worship His Name forever and evermore.