The Harvard Delusion

           Beware the political and philosophical buffoons who masquerade as statesmen, and who fool the ignorant masses into believing them with trite phrases no more profound than “hope” and “change.”  Beware of those whom Roy Campbell, in his poetic satire “The Botanocracy” described as

         “Statesmen-philosophers with earnest souls,

            Whose lofty theories embrace the Poles

            Yet only prove their minds are full of Holes.”

         Real statesmen are not philosophers or metaphysicians.  Rather, they are persons of wisdom, educated at the feet of our ancestors.   As Charles Kingsley explained in his essay “Ancient Civilizations,” the wise do not feed on the shame of our forebears, but on their honor and glory, on great times, noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk, which mental feast Kingsley also points out, is the political implementation of St. Paul’s wise injunction for us to think about whatever things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report (Phil. 4:8).

         Those are not the channels in which most modern political minds now move.  If Alinsky, Marx, Keynes, or the latest New York Times poll are your mentors, you are a fool.  So are those who vote for you.  When you, your voters, and your schemes are finally shipwrecked on the rocks of reality, undeception follows, at least for a moment, until human nature and the noetic effects of sin again re-assert themselves and we unlearn the lessons of history and replace them with fantasies spun out nothing more substantial than the arrogance of the so-called experts and the attendant practical hubris and self-deception that they alone can do what all others failed to do:  namely, to escape the rule of reality.  For them, somehow (we know not how) bad ideas will not yield bad consequences.

         I call it the Harvard delusion. 

        

Fragments: An Anti-Regime Potpourri

(1.) The Obama administration has practiced no self-restraint when it comes to commandeering the auto industry, trying to control and limit our exercise of second amendment rights, trampling boldly and broadly on our first amendment rights, and hijacking health care.  This administration has no trouble at all extending its reach into broad areas of human life that the Constitution sequesters from it.  But it simply cannot find the will to do the things the Constitution requires, like securing the borders.  Indeed, it will sue the states that, desperate for the border control the federal government refuses to provide, try to provide it for themselves.

(2.) The number of those no longer in the work force has grown by more than 8 million under Obama.  Those millions hoped for change, but the change they got wasn't the change they hoped for.  Those 8 million aren't counted in the unemployment percentage, so even if their number grew to 18.5 million, government unemployment numbers might still actually improve, at which time the gov't would declare its pathetic record a rousing success, and the benighted American voters would reward the economic wrecking crew by sending them back into office.

(3.) At the moment, because of the staggering ignorance of the American voter, America is becoming Detroit.  Our electorate seems incapable of continued self-government.  I say this so that you will know what your public schools too often produce:  Relativistic sheep incapable of sustained logical, historical or economic analysis.  So let me put it plainly --  save your country:  home school.  If you are a Democrat, you don’t need to home school.  All you need to do is send Suzy and Johnny off each morning to the local socialist indoctrination facility where the teachers, the principal, and the NEA will produce millions of mind-benumbed little lefties for you.

      

(4.) Confiscatory tax rates and other anti-business government policies stifle investment and, therefore, job production.  So, after Obama changes his policies, businesses will gladly invest the (literally) trillions of dollars they now prudently are holding in reserve.  But BHO won't do that.  He's too busy trying to put the coal industry out of business and investing in green energy offerings that keep dying.  He is anti-big business, and he's getting what he wants -- less and less big business.  And if, despite the currently bad investment environment, a number of courageous, insightful, and hard-working entrepreneurs still succeed growing a thriving business, he'll tell them that they didn't build that.

       He's bad for America in more ways than anyone can count.  Period.

Where Have all the Epics Gone, Long Time Passing?

       I often ask my students why the 20th century, and now the 21^st, produced no great epic poems.  I have yet to receive an answer, any answer.  After 30 years of such questioning, I suspect I never will.

       So here, in pedagogical desperation, I do what I seldom do:  I give them the answer they never gave me.  It is not my own; it comes from Russell Kirk, as does so much that explains what’s wrong with the world.

       Great literature, Kirk insists in his “English Letters in an Age of Boredom,” habitually hovers around four enduring themes:  religion, heroism, love, and human variety.

       But, he says, (1) a society, like ours, which has lost its religious convictions and its piety, denies itself the first theme.  (2) A society that denigrates true greatness denies itself the second.  Think about them what you wish, girl-smitten vampires are not heroes.  (3) A society that takes love for nothing more than carnal gratification denies itself the third.  (4) A society that conceives of humans as little more than accidental, soulless, interchangeable, cogs in a mechanistic nexus denies itself the fourth.  “The springs of the imagination thus are dried up,” Kirk pronounces truly, tragically, and finally.  In that springless desert, not even satire can flourish or long exist, for with the loss of the great themes and imagination comes the loss even of mockery.

       There, in one paragraph, is why great literature died in our hands.  We stopped believing the right things.  We stopped asking the right questions.  In our hands, the perennial issues and the perennial questions to which they gave rise all died.  We have the opposite of a Midas touch.  What we handle turns not to gold, or even to garbage, but to ghosts.

       You can expect nothing else from the culture of death.

       No cure for it can be found, save the Word of Life, which we meticulously have banned from the public square, the academy, the laboratory, and the arena.

       Wyndham Lewis, it turns out, despite his pessimism and complaints, was too optimistic.  He thought human reason might save us.  He never asked what, or Who, might save reason.

       Lewis forgot that while we human creatures are capable of reason, because of our selfish desires and unruly appetites, we are rarely ever reasonable.  Thinking is hard work; thinking rationally harder still.  We are not at all well suited, by birth or by habit, either to hard work or to thinking, much less to both.

       Kirk could have gone on, could have continued his litany of epic killers.  Had he done so, he might have included impatience, the sort bred from years spent planted squarely before a television set, years during which we acquired the habits and rhythms of sitcoms and soap operas – thereby inexorably acquiring a taste only for problems that can be raised and solved in 30 minutes minus commercials, problems like a torn prom dress or backing your dad’s car into a tree.  For us, if it can’t be handled in 22 minutes, it’s too long and too difficult.  Reduced to those shrunken dimensions, Milton’s epic panoply (or Dante’s) becomes a mere screenplay, a script, replete with artificial laugh lines, clichés, and crudities, wherein inane anatomical utterances replace eloquence and wherein scatological shock replaces beauty, truth, and goodness, things far more difficult to conceive, write, produce, and to communicate than garish, slapstick stunts and juvenile vulgarity.  For shrunken sensibilities like ours, the word “epic” means two hours of TV watching for three nights in row.  On any or all of those three nights, thinking is optional, hardly required.

       That shrunken sensibility stands behind what I hear too often from my students.  For example, while discussing Beowulf in an English literature survey course, and the fact that while sometimes you slay the monster, in the end the monster slays you, I asked Jen, a most delightful sorority girl, what monsters she faced.  She said:  “Every day, when I get up, I don’t know what clothes to wear.”

       Somewhere in the 20^th century, the scope of battle shrunk; the monsters withered; and so, apparently, did we.

My Best Moments

       Even in my best moments, I sin.

       When I praise God, I do it mostly for things He has given me.  My praise is not so much rooted in his character but in his giving me what I want.  In such instances, my real god is not God Himself, but my own ease and pleasure.  He gets my praise for catering to me, which reduces Him to little more or else than a means to my ends, a mechanism, a utensil, an instrument.

       At the beginning of his Institutes, Calvin righty insisted that real wisdom consists of two things, knowledge of God and knowledge of myself.  In my sinful prayers they both emerge.  I learn that, at my best, I am wicked.  I learn too of God’s infinite descent and mercy, which graciously accepts praise even on that fetid basis.      

What Jesus Really Promised about the Church and Truth (John 16: 12, 13)

            According to Roman Catholic interpreters, the verses noted above mean that the Holy Spirit will lead the apostles and their successors into much more truth than Jesus has yet given them. That undisclosed truth they could not bear, or could not profitably receive.  The sort of truth intended here, they say, includes doctrines not yet fully developed, like those concerning Mary -- doctrines that articulate her perpetual virginity, her immaculate conception, and her bodily ascension into Heaven.  They also include doctrines more fully articulated later by the church in its ecumenical councils, like the doctrine of the Trinity and those centered on the incarnation.

            Additionally, according to the Roman Catholics with whom I have debated, (and for the rest of this paragraph I employ their own words) apostolic succession is clearly indicated in these verses because (a) the doctrines noted above were not fully articulated during the apostles' lives, and, more importantly, because (b) those doctrines had not been challenged, and therefore did not need to be defended by the apostles, which is what "you cannot bear it now" (v. 12) means.  Therefore, being led by the Spirit into "all truth" is a promise and a privilege intended by Jesus not simply for his apostles, but also for their successors when those truths are revealed later.  Most of the information to be imparted in the future would not have been relevant to the apostles, whose theology was unassailable while they were alive.  In their absence, the Holy Spirit will lead their successors into "all truth" (v. 13).  This passage, therefore, is a guarantor both of apostolic succession and of the RCC's supernaturally endued reliability in matters of faith and morals because the Holy Spirit Himself is utterly reliable. 

            On the contrary, it seems to me that in this passage Jesus intends nothing of the sort asserted by my Catholic colleagues in their interpretation, as a careful examination of the passage in which these verses occur will demonstrate.

            In verse 1, Jesus tells his disciples that the rather chilling things He has told them so far (15:18ff) were told them so that they might not stumble when the difficulties He mentioned actually begin.  He is forewarning them so that they might be better prepared for their coming troubles.  Those coming troubles include persecution by their fellow Jewish countrymen, who will think that by harassing the Christians they are doing God's work (v. 2; Cf. Acts 8: 1ff.).  By forewarning his followers, Jesus is giving them information they could look back upon later with profit (v.4).

            His own task, He tells them, is to return to the One who had sent Him, a fact that left them deeply sorrowful (vv. 5, 6).  In order to assuage that sorrow, Jesus explains to them that his departure, far from being a deprivation, is indeed a great benefit because it makes possible the coming of the Comforter (v. 7), whose own task is twofold -- one task in reference to the world at large, and one task in reference to the apostles themselves.  Regarding the world, the Comforter will reprove (that is, convict, convince, or persuade) it about sin, righteousness, and judgment (vv. 8-11).  Regarding the apostles, Jesus has many more things to tell them, but because of their weaknesses and burdens, He delays his telling (v. 12), which will be carried out in His absence by the Holy Spirit (v. 13), Who will lead them into all the truth that Jesus wants to tell them now but that they could not bear at the moment, truth pertaining to their coming troubles, as the context makes clear.  They are to face great sorrow, the details of which are not yet given to them, except this:  While the world cheers the apostles will weep and wail, much like a woman in labor (vv. 20, 21).  But when it is over, they are destined for great and enduring joy (v. 22). 

            Nothing at all in this passage is either spoken or implied by Jesus about apostolic succession or about Roman Catholic infallibility in matters of faith and morals.  Only the most egregious and self-serving eisegesis insists otherwise.

            Jesus is not assuring His apostles (1) that all that they and their unmentioned successors will believe in the future pertaining to faith and morals is going to be true, or (2) that all the things they and their unmentioned successors believe in the future will be the result of the Spirit's leading, or (3) that all they and their unmentioned successors believe in the future will glorify Christ, something that characterizes things truly revealed by the Spirit (v. 14).   Instead, when the apostles comprehend some currently unbearable truth about their coming travail -- truth that glorifies Christ -- it will be because the Holy Spirit has led them to it.  All such truth comes from the Spirit, and, hence, from Christ Himself.  The "all" (v. 13) that describes the truth they are yet to receive is not universally inclusive, but is truth of a specific sort, truth pertaining to their coming troubles, truth that glorifies Christ after He has departed.  Jesus is not promising them and their unmentioned successors that they will learn literally "all" truth about faith and morals, much less that they will learn literally "all" truth whatever.  He says no such thing.  They are not here promised the truth about exactly how many grains of sand lie on all the beaches in the Caribbean, or about how to clone dinosaurs for breakfast food, or how to master cold fusion.  Nor is He saying that all they and their unmentioned successors teach in the future on faith and morals will be true.  He has in mind truth of a particular sort and for a particular purpose, to which He has been alluding continuously all the way back into the previous chapter, truth about the apostles' coming ordeals, truth that they were in no condition to receive at that moment.

            The text does not say, for example, that all that Peter or his alleged successors teach on matters of faith and morals will be true and will be given to him or to them by the Spirit.  Such things are simply not in view in this passage.  Nor does it say that Peter and the apostles will even have successors, much less anything about the reliability of their future teachings.

            If John 16:13 meant that after the Spirit was given to the apostles they would teach all truth and only truth, then Jesus would be flatly mistaken because after receiving the Spirit Peter, for example, sometimes lived and taught in ways that denied the very gospel itself -- clearly a serious fall from "all truth" on the chief apostle's part.  Sometimes Peter did not believe, teach, or act according to the truth, much less all of it, and was not being led by the Spirit into unbearable truths when he did so.  Following him can -- and did -- lead Christians away from the truth and away from the gospel.  

            Nor do these verses designate the RCC as the infallible arbiter of future theological disputes, such as occurred later in the various ecumenical councils.  That reading of the text is baseless, tendentious, and anachronistic.

            God Himself, not the RCC, will resolve all discrepancies -- theological and otherwise -- though it seems as if He has left their full and final resolution until the end of time.  Short of that, the issues that sometimes vex us probably will not be resolved.  I do not identify God's resolution of those discrepancies with the decisions made about them by the RCC.  Nor does this passage in John.

            To make my point from a different direction: The truth that comes from the Holy Spirit is truth that glorifies Christ (v. 14), not truth that glorifies one group of those that follow Him over all others.  Therefore, I doubt that the self-glorifying claims of the RCC on this point are the truths that Jesus has here in view.

            Nevertheless, Roman Catholics with whom I have discussed this passage assert that apostolic succession and infallibility are, to quote them, "clearly indicated."  But I deny that something is "clearly indicated" that is neither mentioned nor even hinted at, especially if that something is allegedly three or four centuries in the future, as are the ecumenical councils to which my Catholic friends say Jesus is alluding.  If such infallibility truly were "clearly indicated" here, that clear indication would be something more specific, like the mention of Bethlehem as the birthplace of the messiah in Micah (5: 2) centuries before the fact, or like a virgin conceiving a child, as is perhaps predicted in Isaiah (7: 14).  But even that unclear and debatable prediction in Isaiah is exceedingly more "clearly indicated" than the things that Catholics claim to find in these verses.  Indeed, if ecumenical councils and their decisions are present here in John 16, along with apostolic succession and doctrinal and moral infallibility, that fact is not clear at all.  Furthermore, I strongly deny the Catholic assertion that the notion of "unbearableness" in verse 12 means anything like "irrelevant to the apostles," as if Jesus were cryptically referring to Marian and Trinitarian issues that had not yet emerged.

Is John 6 about the eucharist?

         As one of the chief Biblical sources for believing that the actual body and blood of Christ are literally, physically, present in the Eucharist, Roman Catholics (and others) often cite John 6: 22 ff., commonly known as the Bread of Life discourse.  To do so, however, seems to me to ignore the context of Jesus' words and to misunderstand his meaning, as the following explanation will demonstrate.  The text is not Eucharistic.

         I invite, indeed strongly encourage, you to read each portion of the text identified before reading the explanation offered below.

Context and setting (22-25)   

         Geographically, this conversation between Jesus and those around Him occurred primarily, though not exclusively, in the synagogue of Capernaum (v. 59).  Those to whom He spoke were a mixed audience that included his disciples and other followers, his Jewish opponents, and countless unbelieving hangers on, eager to fill their bellies.  Nearly all had seen Him multiply fish and bread in order to feed 5,000 hungry persons at once (John 6: 1-15).  Many of them followed Him to Capernaum to get more free food, if they could, apparently missing the profound theological significance of the miracle they had witnessed and from which they had benefited.

         They did not understand that just as their forebears had been fed by the God-sent manna (also not Eucharistic) from Heaven centuries earlier in order to sustain their lives while they sojourned in the wilderness, even so had God now sent his Son from Heaven in order to feed their souls while on their sojourn through the wilderness of life in a fallen world.  By feeding the crowd with miraculously multiplied fish and bread, Jesus was demonstrating that He was to his audience (and to the world) something like what the manna was to the ancient Israelites.  But his audience did not understand the point, so many of them followed Him to Capernaum not for spiritual sustenance from God, which He came to supply, but simply for more food.  Some among them apparently had an inkling that his miracle showed he was the Messiah, but they wanted more proof.

         The context for this discourse, then, is not the Passover meal, during which Jesus instituted for his small band of disciples the ritual breaking of bread and the drinking of wine, by which they were to remember Him until He returned (Matt. 26: 26 ff.).  While near in time (v. 4), the Passover meal is still seven chapters away -- seven chapters.  The discussion here between Jesus and this mixed multitude is something quite different from the Last Supper and his exclusive instructions to his few followers.  To read this discussion as if Jesus were speaking of a distinctly Christian sacrament to a largely unbelieving Jewish crowd, and obliquely introducing to them without any explanation the concept of transubstantiation, is blatantly to disregard both the textual context and the audience, who first address Jesus, not about the Passover meal, but about how He managed to get to Capernaum without taking the last boat available, the one in which his disciples had departed (v. 25).

Jesus' first statement (26, 27)

         As is sometimes the case with Jesus, He does not answer the question posed to Him, but instead goes directly to the issue at hand, in this case the crowd's shallow motivation for following Him to Capernaum:  the food.  In order to meet them where their minds and hearts actually were at that moment, Jesus employs metaphorical language about food and advises them to work for the food that does not perish, food unlike the ancient manna or the recent fish and bread, both of which eventually rot.  Rather than physical food that perishes, He directs them toward a very different kind of food, a food that lasts, and that yields eternal life.  Physical food is not the sort of food He has in mind in this regard, and physical eating is not what He recommends, though that is the sort of food and consumption they now seek.  The soul nourishment He has in mind was something that He, the Son of Man, had been appointed and approved ("sealed") to give them by God Himself.  That nourishment of soul is not subject to decay the way physical food is.  Jesus is clearly distinguishing between physical food and food for the soul, and focusing their attention on the latter. 

         The metaphor of eating and drinking that Jesus employs here was common enough among ancient Jewish teachers and writers, and normally stood for appropriation -- in this case appropriating Jesus.

The people speak (28)

         The people respond to Jesus' admonition to work for the imperishable food that yields eternal life by asking Him what works they ought to perform in order to get this imperishable food.  Though we might well understand that their question was sincere, in light of what follows it was ill-conceived and misguided.

Jesus' second statement (29)

         As directly as possible, Jesus tells them that, in order to have eternal life, they must believe -- not eat and drink -- believe.  No mention, metaphorical or otherwise, is made here of food or of eating.  Believing in the One Whom God sent is the key that unlocks the door to eternal life, not the mastication of body or swallowing of blood.  Jesus is plainly and simply instructing them to move their attention away from food to something far more important and enduring, namely the well being of their souls through faith in Him.  Physical food and physical eating are simply not in view here.  Faith, not food; believing, not eating; is the issue

The people speak (30, 31)

         Perhaps some of his listeners understood that His point pertained to faith and not to eating because, in response to his instruction that they believe in Him, they asked him for additional signs as a basis for their belief -- as if the healings (v. 2) and the feeding of the 5,000 (v. 11-14) they had recently witnessed somehow were not enough. Others, just as apparently, still thought He was talking about normal food and drink.  To them, He responds.

Jesus' third statement (32, 33)

         As He did in verse 26, Jesus responds to the people on his own basis, not theirs.  Though they are thinking still about the physical food from Heaven that sustained their ancestors in the wilderness, He responds by directing them to the metaphorical bread that comes from God and that gives eternal life to the world -- and not merely to the Israelites in the desert.  Surely his reference to bread here is a figure of speech, for no combination of flour, salt, herbs and yeast yields eternal life for the world.  Bakers create many wonderful things in their ovens, but salvation is not one of them.  By speaking this way, Jesus is trying to move his listeners away from their crassly self-indulgent and materialistic view of the Messiah and his reign.  He tells them about a higher, a more ideal (so to speak) kind of bread.  He wants them to know that the manna from Heaven was prophetic, or indicative, or predictive, of the Incarnation, of Him and his entry into the world so that by faith the world  might be saved.

The people speak (34)

         His reference to the bread that gives eternal life evokes from them a strong and direct response, even demand:  "Give us this bread always!"

         It is difficult to know for certain if they understand to what Jesus is referring, but it seems that they do not.  They do not ask for help to aid their belief in Him.  They ask for a bread that is to be given, not a day at a time, or only for a while (as was the manna), or for a one-time feast of fish and bread such as they just experienced from the power and largesse of Christ.  They ask instead for bread to be given them always, apparently thinking that if they were given it  -- and were given it always -- it would yield eternal life for them simply because the giving of that physical bread continued.

        

Jesus fourth statement (35-40)

         Again, Jesus makes plain for them that the bread He has in mind is figurative bread, not literal bread, and that He Himself is the bread of which He speaks.  He tells them that they must come to Him and believe in Him because He is the bread of life.  If they believe in Him, they will not hunger and they will not thirst.  Again, in keeping with the figurative language He has been using, the eating and drinking to which He refers are not physical.  They are used in reference to believing.  Neither are the hunger and thirst they assuage physical.  He is not saying that if they believe in Him they will never again need to eat or drink, which would be the case if He were speaking of literal bread.  Of course they will grow physically hungry and thirsty again.  One does not cease to be physically hungry or physically thirsty simply because one is now a believer.  That is not the sort of eating and drinking, or the sort of hunger and thirst, He has in mind.  But, if they believe in Him, they will find enduring spiritual satisfaction because faith in Him is nourishment for the soul.  Once they turn to Him in faith, once they believe, their souls will have found the food on which their souls were meant to feed, food that yields not mere physical satisfaction, but eternal life.  They already had eaten physical food on the other side of the lake.  But that sort of eating did not keep them physically satisfied.  Nor did it redeem them.  The sort of satisfaction Jesus has in mind does not emerge from literal eating and drinking, but from believing.  Believing in Him, He boldly states, is the very will of God.  Because it is, if they believe in Him, God will deliver them on the day of resurrection. 

The people speak (41, 42)

         Jesus' insistence that He came down from Heaven stirs up dissent and debate among them because they know that He comes from Nazareth.  They know his parents.  Knowing his parents and his hometown, they figure they know and understand his origins.  They do not.

Jesus' fifth statement (43-51)

In order to put right the false objections they entertained about his Heavenly origins, Jesus reminds those who have been drawn to Him that they were drawn to Him by the very will and power of God, and He quotes from the Scriptures to that effect.   Once again He urges them to believe in Him because belief (not eating) is the path to eternal life (v. 47).  In explanation of his admonition to believe in Him, he reiterates the analogy He employed earlier by telling them again that, just as their ancestors ate manna in the wilderness, they themselves should eat his flesh and drink his blood -- startling and graphic language that compares the Israelites eating manna in the wilderness with his audience believing in Him.  That is, just as the ancient Israelites ate manna in the wilderness and thereby found sustenance for their bodies, they themselves should believe in Him and find sustenance for their souls -- eternal life -- a process that He graphically and memorably figures forth as eating his body and drinking his blood, a figure of speech He explicitly employed earlier (v. 35) when He clearly and overtly identified believing in Him with eternal life itself.  His point here is to urge them onward to belief, not urge them literally to gnaw on his body and to drink his blood.  In other words, because their minds seem so firmly fixed on the pursuit of physical food, He makes a shockingly graphic reference to physical food, and to eating and drinking it, as a verbal means by which to catch their attention, and thereby to re-direct their thoughts from food for their bodies to food for their souls, namely the eternal life that is the blessed consequence of believing in Him.  So that they, in their craving for food and drink, might turn to Him in faith, He refers to Himself as food and to believing in Him as eating and drinking.

Notice carefully that in verses 35, 40, and 47 Jesus clearly indicates that believing in Him yields eternal life.  When, therefore, He indicates in other verses that eating his flesh and drinking his blood also yield eternal life, He clearly is drawing a connection between believing, on the one hand, and what He calls eating and drinking, on the other.  In this figure of speech, the latter symbolizes the former, not the other way round.  The believing is literal; the eating and drinking of his actual body and blood are not.  To take his words literally, as if He were linking their eternal salvation to some kind of grotesque cannibalistic ritual, is abhorrent.  To imagine that He is directing them literally to feast on his body and to drink his blood is a notion any ancient Jew would have found both wicked and disgusting -- and clearly against the quite specific injunction of God Himself against any such practice (Gen. 9:4).  That is not what Jesus intends.

By calling Himself "the living bread" in v. 51, He puts beyond all doubt that his language here is metaphorical.  Babies and goats, for example, are alive. Loaves of bread in an oven or stored in plastic bags on a grocery store shelf are not.  Wafers, crackers and loaves are not alive.  Jesus is referring to Himself as the living bread, and his use of the word “bread” here is unquestionably metaphorical.  Bread is not alive.  Jesus is.  He cannot be speaking literally about Himself as "living bread."  He is a man, not a loaf.  Bread is not alive; He is.  It must be a metaphor.  It cannot be literal.  Nor, in keeping with his non-literal language, does He mean for us literally to eat His body and drink his blood.  Chewing Him up and swallowing Him down are not what He has in mind.   

The people speak (52)

         Still not properly understanding Jesus' metaphorical language, the crowd was shocked and grew deeply puzzled: How could they possibly eat his body or drink his blood?   It was unthinkable.  Had they understood his words in the non-literal way in which He meant them, their befuddlement and disgust would have quickly disappeared.  Their befuddlement is rooted in their misunderstanding Jesus as speaking literally. 

Jesus' sixth statement (53-59)

         Jesus continues to press home the startling metaphor He is employing, apparently intending by its cannibalistic absurdity to shock His hearers out of their preoccupation with physical food and with physical eating and drinking.  So He repeats and amplifies His point, which is expressed in the aorist tense (v. 53), which denotes a once-for-all action, a grammatical choice thoroughly unsuited to the repeated participation required in the RC Eucharist, were the Roman reading here to be followed.

The disciples speak (60)

         Some of Jesus' disciples were among those who mistakenly thought He was speaking literally.  Because they did, they too found His words deeply offensive, and (as one translation aptly puts it) "hard to stomach."  Because of their misunderstanding, and the shock and offense to which it led, He provides His own explanation of the teaching He has just articulated.

Jesus' seventh statement (61-67)

         As He sometimes does after He speaks figuratively and non-literally (cp. for example, Luke 8: 11ff), Jesus explains carefully to His disciples exactly what He meant.  He tells them that He is not speaking about actual flesh.  He tells them that the flesh yields no benefit, none.  As in the King James translation, "the flesh profits nothing."  The word "nothing" could hardly be more absolute.  Any benefit He has been talking about up until now is not related to flesh or to eating it.  Flesh profits nothing.  By contrast, what He has been talking about up until now yields unimaginable profit -- namely eternal life.  If  flesh profits nothing, and if what He has been talking about yields the unimaginable profit and benefit of eternal life, then He cannot have been talking about flesh.  By explaining Himself in this way, Jesus was correcting the error of some of his disciples, an error they shared with the crowds that also had mistook his meaning by interpreting Him literally.  His words are spiritual, He tells them, and it is His words, His message, that brings eternal life, and which He puts forward for their acceptance and beleif, not his flesh and blood for their physical consumption.  Those fleshly things profit nothing, He insists.

         The RCC, it seems to me, falls into the exact error Jesus worked so carefully to correct throughout this discussion.  The RCC insists that Jesus is speaking literally about eating human flesh and drinking human blood, and that He is doing so in agreement with their transubstantiationist view of the Eucharist.  But you could hardly insist that Jesus is telling you to eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to obtain salvation if He tells you that the flesh you eat profits precisely nothing.  Salvation is very far from nothing.  If the RCC is intent upon understanding Jesus literally, then the word "nothing" ought to be literally understood as well.  In short, by misreading Him as they do, Catholics are ripping the Bread of Life discourse out of its historical setting and planting it foursquare into the upper room and the Passover, and by doing so they thereby insist that Jesus was, without any overt explanation at all, incorporating for a disparate Jewish audience in Capernaum the Greek philosophical notions we call "substance" and "accidents," as well as the distinctions between them.   No one in Capernaum at that moment -- not Jesus, not his disciples, not his Jewish opponents, and not the food-seeking multitude -- says anything explicitly about the Passover meal or about the Eucharist, much less about the later RC doctrine of transubstantiation or any of its theological corollaries and Greek philosophical underpinnings.  By insisting what it does, the RCC is reading enormous amounts of its own theology back into the text.  As the next few verses indicate, Peter, whom they follow, does not. 

Peter speaks (68-70)

         While some of Jesus' followers left Him at that time, Peter did not.  Once Peter heard and understood Jesus' explanation of the connection between eternal life and believing in Him, he stood firm.  Indeed, rather than following the deserters, Peter rose to the theological and spiritual profundity of which he is sometimes so capable.  Though others might go away, Peter knows that the words -- not the flesh -- of eternal life come from Jesus because Jesus is the Son of the living God.  In John 6, Jesus Himself makes plain repeatedly and
 precisely how He expects people to obtain the gift of 
eternal life -- by believing.  Peter gets it: 
"we believe," Peter says, not "we eat, drink, or swallow" (v. 69). 

Salvation is appropriated by faith, by belief, not by the
 gastro-intestinal system.  The eating and drinking are 
figurative of belief.  Belief is not figurative of
 chewing, drinking, or swallowing.

         What we have in the bread is symbolic of his flesh.  The flesh He gave for the world was real.  It was crucified and has ascended into Heaven, which is where it remains until now, and will remain until the Second Coming.  That flesh is not on earth.  We know where that flesh is.  We know where his body now resides.  His disciples themselves told us so.  They watched it ascend to Heaven.  They told us about the event.  They told us exactly where his body now is.  It is not where some traditions insist it is.

         Perhaps long exposure has inured us to how shocking the Roman way of interpreting Jesus really is.  In order to feel it again, we ought to interpret a parallel passage from the same text.  In John 15: 5, Jesus says, "I am the vine and you are the branches." 

I quote the words of a Catholic fellow discussant words regarding John 6 here:  "No matter how much you deny it, those words are unambiguous.  They are clear, direct statements and *by definition* are not the [sic] figures of speech."  If I applied his bold words and bolder hermeneutic to the passage in John 15, then Jesus' words are both literal and true, and the only reason that He and all Christians don't appear to have bark for skin and leaves for hair is because while the substance of both His body and ours has changed from body to bush and from hair to leaf, we still look like we did before because the accidents remain the same.  Despite all appearances to the contrary, Jesus really is a vine and we really are branches.  He really is a door (John 10: 7, 9); He really is a shepherd, and, by extension, we really are sheep (John 10: 7-16).  The only reason He doesn't look like a door and we don't look like sheep is because, while the substances have changed, the accidents have not.  It's a miracle.  How we can have the substance of branch and of sheep simultaneously must be a miracle too.

         

Edith Schaeffer, RIP

(from Udo Middelmann)

Edith Rachel Merritt Seville Schaeffer died on March 30, 2013 in her home in Gryon, Switzerland, where she had moved 13 years ago to be surrounded by memories, her music, her son’s paintings and the detailed care organized daily by her daughter Deborah Middelmann. She was born on November 3, 1914 as the third daughter of Dr. George Hugh and Jessie Maude Seville in Wenchau, China, where her parents ran a school for girls and taught the Bible in Mandarin.

Edith Schaeffer marked her life with the expression of rich ideas, often rebellious against the staid and superficial life she saw among Christians. The oldest sister became a communist in New York of the 30ies, the second eloped.  Edith Seville married Francis August Schaeffer in 1935 and in no way was she the typical pastor’s or missionary wife. She turned her active mind to work with her husband, teaching first seminary wives to think and to question, to create and make of life something of integrity, as her husband so wanted her to do.  

To put her husband through 3 years of seminary she tailored men’s suits, made ball room gowns and wedding dresses for private clients. From whole cow skins she made belts sold in New York stores. With very little money she prepared tasteful and varied meals. She painted a fresco on the ceiling of the vestibule in the little church her husband pastored in Grove City, while he attached a steeple to it with the elders’ help. They lectured together and encouraged many to use their minds to understand what they believed and how to respond to the intellectual and cultural ideas around them. Together they travelled and taught in churches and university halls from Finland to Portugal, helping people understand Christianity as the truth of the universe, not a personal faith, and pointing out the cultural and philosophical pitfalls in everyone’s way.

She lived her life as a work of art, an exhibition of true significance and a portrait of a generous, stunning and creative personality. She always sought ways to draw on life’s opportunities to show that human beings are made for the enrichment of everyone’s life, for the encouragement of people. This was a central part of the work she and her husband engaged in from the very start of their life together. She was in all things generous. When books provided royalties she used all of it to give her four children and their families annual reunions for the cousins to know each other.

When she left the work of L’Abri after her husband’s death she started the Francis A Schaeffer Foundation with Udo and Deborah Middelmann to safeguard his papers and the ideas that underline their life, to make them available for a wider audience. She found people interesting anywhere, engaged in conversation and so met the most amazing individuals. She talked, for instance, with the author Andre Aciman, standing in line for tickets to Carnegie Hall in NY and found out that he had had our village doctor, Dr. Gandur, as his pediatrician in Alexandria, Egypt. He was so grateful to be in touch through her with his old doctor.

She enjoyed people in the streets, in airplanes and over the phone, wherever she found them or when they could reach her. She stayed up nights to help someone out of their distress or need. With much imagination she served her meals with stunning decorations made from twigs and moss, field flowers and stones. Duncan from Kenya once remarked: “This is the first place where I see the beauty of the truth of the Bible consistently carried over into all areas of life.”

After the death of her husband in 1984 Edith Schaeffer added a whole new chapter to her life. She continued to write books, lectured widely and returned twice to her place of birth in China. She investigated the making the Baby Grand Piano she had received as a gift at the Steinway factory in New York and presented “Forever Music” in a concert at Alice Tully Hall in New York with the Guarneri Quartet. Through Franz Mohr, the chief piano voicer at Steinway she came to know musicians like Rostropovich, the pianists Horowitz and Rudoph Serkin, the Cellists YoYo Ma and Ya Ya Ling, and also the guitarist Christopher Parkening. She organized concerts and elaborate receptions for musicians and friends in her home in Rochester, MN. When she met B. B. King at the International Jazz Festival in Montreux he gave her his pass to the evening’s concert. Once on vacations on the island of Elba, Sonny Rollins noticed her beauty and rhythm in the audience as she danced during his concert, came off the stage and danced with her.

Today she “slipped into the nearer presence of Jesus”, her Lord, from whom she awaits the promised resurrection to continue her life on earth and to dance once again with a body restored to wholeness.

If you wish to honor Edith Schaeffer’s life you can support her intense commitment to the work of the Francis Schaeffer Foundation, Jermintin 3, CH -1882 Gryon, Switzerland