Was just reading a little about the HOly Communion on Wikipedia... I wouldn't say Wikipedia is a reliable source...but well, it kinda summarises lengthy literature...

It gave a brief comparison of Holy Communion in Catholicism and that believed by the Calvinists.

Catholicism holds to the belief of Transubstantiation, which is the belief that the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Jesus during Consecration. The Eucharist is a commemoration, or, in Greek, anamnesis of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, understood in the fullest sense given to it in Biblical tradition. In other words, it is a memorial which does not just bring to mind the event celebrated, but also makes it truly present. The Eucharist is therefore understood to be not simply a representation of Christ's presence, or a remembrance of his Passion and Death, but an actual participation in the Sacrifice of Christ, the manifestation, in the present, of an event that occurred once for all in time. The Eucharist makes present that one sacrifice, not a different sacrifice. The priest and victim of the sacrifice are one and the same; the only difference is in the manner in which it is offered—the Church teaches that the Mass is the sacrifice at Calvary made present in an unbloody manner.

According to the Roman Catholic Church, when the bread and wine are consecrated in the Eucharist, they cease to be bread and wine, and become instead the body and blood of Christ. The empirical appearances are not changed, but the reality is. The consecration of the bread (known as the host) and wine represents the separation of Jesus's body from his blood at Calvary. However, since he has risen, the Church teaches that his body and blood can no longer be truly separated. Where one is, the other must be. Therefore, although the priest (or minister) says, "The body of Christ", when administering the host, and, "The blood of Christ", when presenting the chalice, the communicant who receives either one receives Christ, whole and entire.

(I'm confused.... empirical appearances not changed...but reality is??.... someone enlighten me pls...)

The Calvinist Reformed faith:

Many Reformed Christians, particularly those following John Calvin, hold that Christ's body and blood do not come down to inhabit the elements, but that "the Spirit truly unites things separated in space" (Calvin).

Following a phrase of Augustine, the Calvinist view is that "no one bears away from this Sacrament more than is gathered with the vessel of faith". "The flesh and blood of Christ are no less truly given to the unworthy than to God's elect believers", Calvin said, "but those who partake by faith receive benefit from Christ, and the unbelieving are condemned by partaking. By faith (not a mere mental apprehension), and in the Holy Spirit, the partaker beholds God incarnate, and in the same sense touches him with hands, so that by eating and drinking of bread and wine Christ's actual presence penetrates to the heart of the believer more nearly than food swallowed with the mouth can enter in."

It's all still a matter of faith. To believe in transubstantiation is faith. Calvin also promotes partaking it in faith. Faith....is the evidence of things not seen (Heb 11:1) Isn't it true that we just believe what we choose to believe?

Oh hey pple...I've got another bloggie...a less-serious one :P

U guys can find it at www.thecrystalsea.blogspot.com

:)

God keep!

I think I woke up with this feeling of restlessness yet sweetness...
I dreamt of something peculiar... haha...Somewhat fairytalish...but nice anihow..

My dream...

I was in this big green field...those kind of field without soil that kind... and it was somewhat trimmed with bright yellow flowers..Couldn't remember what those flowers were exactly..could be my favourite sunflower or tulips...
Then there were likewhite tiny rabbits , and also those brown rabbits with drooping ears! The real ones that I saw outiside my dream were as huge as skippy but the ones in my dream were cute and small! Reminds me of Peter Rabbit :P
And the sky was cloudless... and there wasn't a sun..... But it was still brightly lit.... I think..... haha.. I know I looked up and my eyes weren't hurt lar..
Perfect setting.

I was just tickling those rabbit's ears like how I would usually tickle Skippy's... and just sitting down and staring at them. And then I know in that dream I wasn't alone. Because I was sitting there, stroking the rabbits WHILE waiting for someone..it was somewhat like an anticipation.

Then that someone came with a kite...
And then I was doing my usual 'yay! jump jump!' thing...
and then he held my hand and said...'aiyar don't be so excited lar..u're like a kid!' and then he pinched my nose and I torted," hey don't touch my nose!!!"
Aniwae that was picture perfect I think..cos he was dressed in white loose shirt... JUST LIKE those that I've often day-dreamed of! And I remember feeling super happy...

Then it's kinda weird. Right after I said 'don't touch my nose!', I realise that the kite was gone... I mean now that I'm outta my dream, I realise that the kite was no longer in the dream! But in the dream itself, I didn't think anything of it. Haha..weird...
Aniwae that guy started telling me and naming me the 'breed' of rabbits and I remember being thrilled... ' u mean rabbits have breeds??'
Then we just sat there...and I remember just putting my head on his shoulder and feeling belonged. Then after awhile I said...'do u think the rabbits would like the flowers?' Then he said...' u go and try lor'
I went to take those flowers and gave it to the rabbits! Then they all scurried away! Then I was like 'oh shit oh shit! they are afraid of yellow!!'
And he said..'must be the itchy pollen..'
And then I ran over to him...made him sit down and place my head on his shoulders again... as if it's somethign that I must do. hahaha...
Then I can't remember.....

But I remember who that guy is!
heee..... but it's weird how he came in...
Good to write about it...so I won't forget...

(This is a repeated entry from my blogspot bloggie! :) )

Oh dear..I'm once again, confused!

Just attended my Bible Study 's BBQ...

Had a talk with the pastor who's been facilitating the BS all these while..

Didn't exactly prepared my questions, but started asking him alot alot alot. He was actually a Roman Catholic, but when he was younger, someone brought him to a Protestant church, and there he realised that a hymn that has been sung in his Catholic Church, which more or less stated the Catholic theology.. was full of unbiblical doctrine.

Here are some of the questions that I have:

1) The Roman Catholics justify the presence of the Pope with Matthew 16:19, how do u explain that?

Matthew 16:18-19 "And I say unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsover thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

Well he said that referring to the Greek Bible..the orginial tongue of the NT, Peter meant 'pebble', and the 'rock' wasn't referring to Peter, but Christ. cos in vs 16, Simon Peter answered and said,"Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." So.... Christ is the rock.

As for the vs 19 with regards to the keys...eh I forgot to ask him about it...But he brought up a very good point.... right after the verses quoted above, within the same chapter..Christ had to rebuke Peter in that famous verse, "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God but those that be of men." (vs 23)

So....no matter how great Peter is.... he's still very fallible, isn't he? so why attribute so much reverence to Peter, and the subsequent succession of the popes?

2) Catholics claim that they don't worship Mary.

Then he said that apparently, it's against the Bible to worship Mary, but even though Roman Catholics profess so... their tradition and practices don't really reflect that...

He quoted Luke 1:41-50 " And it came to pass that when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the HOly Ghost: And she spake out with a loud voice, and said, Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy. And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord.

And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in GOD MY SAVIOUR. For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden: for behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation..."

So basically he quoted this verse to tell me that the Roman Catholics have, in essence, esteemed Mary higher than Christ, but the fact that Mary called Christ her saviour meant that Mary is also a sinner, like the rest of us. God chose her, as He had done so thruout history..choosing people of low estate.. and he mentioned something about Immaculate Conception....which I can't remember...

3)Okae..back to the thingy about the papacy..I asked him when did this tradition of successions of popes come about..

He told me it was somewhat of a power struggle between the pope and a king... well I can't exactly remember what he said cos there were too much information, but in a nutshell, it was something like the pope threatened to stop conducting the mass if the people adhered to the king...so the people, who were concerned about being damned to hell and their loved ones remaining in purgatory ...were afraid and thus supported the pope, and thereafter the popes claim that they were successors of Peter.....

and he mentioned something about 3 popes cursing each other....

4) Catholic Bible has the extra books..the 'apocryphal ' books... asked him why they werenot considered inspiredword of God...

and he said something that the canonicty of the Bible has been ascertained...Right before the council of carthage came together to decide on the NT. The OT did not contain the apocryphal books..it was during the dark ages that those books crept back into the 'bible'....ah huh....and that's why purgatory and indulgences are not practised by the Protestants...since we have the bible without those passages...

okaee....i think this is all i can remember. I have terrible memory...

But he told me to read a book .something like the Two Babylonian Cities... or something like that...needa get that book.... anione has it??

And oh he said something very 'strong'...that kinda make me got scared..

Roman Catholicism is the very tool of Satain to establish the anti-christ movement.....

and I'm very shocked after hearing this....

Cos I'm quite 'enthusiastic' about Catholicism..

Haizzz...I need to pray...

Ah...first  intellectual blog entry.. :)

Am currently reading this book that I've borrowed from the Central Library, "A history of the Bible" -- Christopher De Hamel

He is writing from a pretty much historical point of view, nothing religious...and that's why I guess it's useful in my finding out... Trying to avoid books that would give me too skewed a view point.

Here's the little that I've got ...not much...

Late 4th century: Saint Jerome translated the books of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, which is the everyday language of the people living in Western Europe at that time. By that time,the Hebrew Old Testament had been assembled in many stages, parts of it up to a thousand years earlier, in the deserts and ancient cities of the Near East, and the Jewish scriptures had been supplemented with the 4 gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), and other New Testament books written in Greek by various authors within a century of the lifetime of Christ.Hence, the Bible, has since that time, existed as a single entity in a continued and unbroken tradition.

Jerome's native language was most likely Greek, and he studied Latin under the famous grammarian, Donatus, since he was 12. He then set out on travels and study in other parts of the Roman Empire.He visited Palestine and the Near East where he perfected Greek and began to study Hebrew. He held some kind of office in the papal household in Rome, apparently has a secretary to Pope Damascus, bishop of Rome in AD 366-384. The popes were already established as the administrative leaders of Christendom.

Many medieval Latin Gospel manuscripts preserved copies of prefaces which Jerome addressed to the 'most blessed Pope Damascus' referring to the fact that Damascus had evidently commissioned him to prepare a revision of the text of the four Latin gospels. There were already many renderings of the Gospels into Latin then available in Rome. These had been copied so many times that countless minor variants crept into the text. Anyone copying out by hand a text as lengthy or as complicated as the BIble will occasionally misread a word or two or will accidentally corrupt the text by attempting to correct the apparent mistranscriptions of an earlier scribe. Next copyist will most likely to repeat these errors and introduce others.

*And I would like to stop at this juncture to comment on something. Multiplied errors in copying!! One really needs alot alot alot of faith to believe that the Word of God is preserved... eh?

Papal household of Damascus would at this time have had two principal verisions of the Gospels. One would have been in Greek, the language in which the texts were first written. And the most common version was known as the 'Old Latin' versions. It was PROVINCIAL AND INCONSISTENTLY translated. When the Roman Empire became Christian and the popes were reasserting the primacy of Rome, it was natural that there should be a Bible in the metropolitan langauge of the government, and hence the OL version was brought into fill the gap. But Jerome found it to be corrupt, and thus redrafted those into accurate and idiomatic Roman Latin.

He started translating the OT from Hebrew to Latin and realised that the Hebrew Scriptures did not include the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, I-II Maccabees, and Baruch, all of which were in the common Greek version of the scriptures. (Recall that the OT was originally written in Hebrew!!)  St Jerome eliminated these books from his definitive edition of the OT and downgraded them as 'apocryphal'. (Apocrypha => Hidden books). Other books in question were: Esther 10:4 to 16:24 and Daniel 13, 14. He also arranged the OT to bring it in line with the order of the Hebrew Bible...

Well, after he died, those rejected books found their way into the Latin speaking church. And the form in which they were reinstated was by that of the archair Old Latin, which was the very version that gave Jerome the purpose to redraft the scriptures!!!Good portions of the Old Latin survive for no other reason than that Jerome utterly excluded them.

Aniwae..the final Latin Bible is known as the Vulgate, and is actually more of a hybrid than its reputation suggests. The name simply means the 'popular' version. The monumental Vulgate edition of the Latin Bible came into use in most of Western Christendom thoughout the Middle Ages, it was puplished by Gutenberg, and is still in print.

Manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate in the Middle Ages:

-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, I-II Samuel, I-II Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, all the 12 minor prophets from Joel to Malachi, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Songs of Songs, I-II Chronicles, Ezra, Nehamiah, Esther (Translated by Jerome from Hebrew)

-Matthew, Mark, Luke and John ( translated from the Greek by Jerome)

-Acts (could be translated by Jerome or some other from Greek)

-The rest of the NT which isn't authentically from any text of Jerome, though the manuscripts indicated that these books were ascribed to him

- Baruch, Ecclesiasticus, Wisdom, III-IV Esdras, I-II Maccabees (rejected by Jerome, supplied unchanged from the Old Latin)

- Tobit and Judith ( translated by Jerome from the Greek but afterwards rejected by him)

~ There , there. I shall stop here for now. Too much for pple to read aniwae. U guys will zonk off... But I do have thoughts about what I learnt from here. I was thinking about the Protestant Bible which has none of the scriptures that was deemed apocryphal by Jerome, and kinda can't help but link it to history. Surely, Jerome's reason for not including those OT books that were not in Hebrew was legitimate. It was the people who reinstated them back... So well I have two options:

1) Believe that my Protestant Bible without the apocryphal books is the 'right' and most authentic Bible version, since those books are truly corrupt... as explained above.

2) MAYBE those apocryphal books are also truly inspired by God. since they found their way back into the Latin Vulgate even after Jerome, a renowned scholar, had removed it. God could have preserved His word and thus reinstated them...

How how how?? I need divine wisdom!