Book of Kells, Chi Rho folio, c. 800 · public domain

Christianity

Tradition·Founded 30 CE·est. ~2.4 billion worldwide

Judaism → Christianity → 11 branches

Branch
Core tenet of Christianity⚖ contested within

The bread is the body.

Rome says the substance changes and the appearances do not. Orthodoxy says it changes and declines to explain the mechanism. Luther said Christ is in, with and under the bread; Zwingli said the meal remembers him. No other Christian sentence has got more people killed.

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The eucharistic argument is where Christian unity broke and stayed broken. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 used the word transubstantiation and Trent defined it: the substance of bread becomes the substance of Christ's body while every observable property of bread remains. The Orthodox affirm the change just as strongly, use the word metabole, and have generally refused to adopt the Aristotelian explanation, treating the how as none of anyone's business. Luther kept the real presence and rejected the philosophy; his 1529 meeting with Zwingli at Marburg agreed on fourteen articles and foundered on the fifteenth, which is why there are Lutherans and Reformed rather than one Protestantism. Zwingli's memorialism became the default in Baptist and most evangelical practice, where communion is monthly or quarterly rather than weekly. Who may receive follows directly: Catholic and Orthodox churches practise closed communion, and the resulting scene at an interchurch wedding, where half the family stays in the pew, is where the doctrine gets felt.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The Mass. Catholicism · rite Go deeper →
The liturgy is heaven on earth. Eastern Orthodoxy Go deeper →
Word and sacrament. Lutheranism · rite Go deeper →
The sacrament meeting. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints · rite Go deeper →
The Holy Qurbana. The Church of the East · rite Go deeper →
Immersion. The Baptists · rite Go deeper →

The conversation

argument stays attached to the claim it is about All discussion →

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