[Herbert] McCabe’s starting point in the essay “Transubstantiation and the Real Presence” is a straight affirmation of standard Catholic teaching. He contrasts it with an understanding of the presence that is, at one extreme, metaphorical, and at the other extreme, materialistic. He talks about the food and drink of the Eucharist being “radically or as we say ”˜substantially’ transformed”, and about it not “remaining ontologically the same”.
Early on he makes an important distinction between what it means to say “Christ” is present in the Eucharist and to say “the body of Christ” is present. It is by speaking of “body of Christ”, rather than just of “Christ” that he can make the most of the word “sacramental” that defines the mode of presence that is believed to occur in the Eucharist.
His theology of the Eucharist is a theology of it as sacrament of the body, and blood, of Christ. His concern with the bread and wine will not be directly with what happens to them, but with what it means to say they are sacraments of the body and blood of Christ.
Read it all.
(The Tablet) Liam Walsh–A taste of the future: The Theology of the Sacraments
[Herbert] McCabe’s starting point in the essay “Transubstantiation and the Real Presence” is a straight affirmation of standard Catholic teaching. He contrasts it with an understanding of the presence that is, at one extreme, metaphorical, and at the other extreme, materialistic. He talks about the food and drink of the Eucharist being “radically or as we say ”˜substantially’ transformed”, and about it not “remaining ontologically the same”.
Early on he makes an important distinction between what it means to say “Christ” is present in the Eucharist and to say “the body of Christ” is present. It is by speaking of “body of Christ”, rather than just of “Christ” that he can make the most of the word “sacramental” that defines the mode of presence that is believed to occur in the Eucharist.
His theology of the Eucharist is a theology of it as sacrament of the body, and blood, of Christ. His concern with the bread and wine will not be directly with what happens to them, but with what it means to say they are sacraments of the body and blood of Christ.
Read it all.