The Real Presence of the Big Mac

Acolyte4236 said...

Here I am not suggesting that the body is in more than one place, but only in one place. I am suggesting then that many places can access one body or rather that the one body can be accessible from many places. So take one way of thinking about God’s omnipresence. God is not in every place as in spatial location, but every place is present to God and hence God’s access to every location immediately without being located in or circumscribable by any of them.

It therefore seems logically possible for a body to be in one and only one place but for it by divine power to be accessible from many locales. This view denies that Christ is in more than one place at a time qua body but that his body is still accessible to many different agents.

As I noted before, I don’t see why a locally circumscribably body can’t be accessed from many different points of space. That seems to accommodate the properties you take to be essential to human nature without seemingly violating at least that part of transubstantiation.

I’ll make several brief observations:

i) God and bodies have very different properties. Indeed, these represent contrary properties. For a body is, by definition, corporeal whereas God is, by definition, incorporeal.

So, for Perry to shift gears from divine omnipresence to the physical body of Christ is patently fallacious.

ii) Also notice that Perry hasn’t actually presented anything like a detailed model of how this is possible. All he’s really done is to draw a pretty word-picture.

So that’s not a real argument. It’s merely picture language.

iii) Even assuming that his description is coherent, there is no more presumption that this is true than the existence of Leibnizian monads.

iv) Apropos (iii), it’s one thing to postulate conjectural mechanisms for something you know to be true. But it’s quite different to postulate conjectural mechanisms as a substitute for knowing that something is true.

That’s the fatal flaw in Perry’s theological method. His belief-system is several steps removed from any reliable source of knowledge.

Oh, he’ll occasionally cite a verse of Scripture as a pious fillip to Orthodox tradition. But that’s purely cosmetic. There’s no systematic use of Scripture to even supply the basic framework.

v) But is his description even coherent? Let’s take a comparison:

Here I am not suggesting that the Big Mac is in more than one place, but only in one place. I am suggesting then that many places can access one Big Mac or rather that the one Big Mac can be accessible from many places. I don’t see why a locally circumscribably Big Mac can’t be accessed from many different points of space.

But imagine millions of daily consumers accessing the one Big Mac. The obvious problem is that if millions of consumers were eating the same Big Mac, it wouldn’t last very long.

There’s more to the dogma of the Real Presence than the mere availability of Christ’s physical body. There is also the consumability of his body.

So, over and above its availability, Perry would need to further accessorize his model such that one body instantly regenerates when you take a bite out of it. Like those horror films in which the bloody stump of a monster grows back before your very eyes. You can see the new limb sprout forth like a dandelion on steroids.

Now, is it possible for God to miraculously make that happen? I suppose so.

But what does any of this have to do with the very modest descriptions of the Lord’s Supper in the NT?