Bible. New Testament -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Jesus Christ -- Historicity
[341] And Christ is as it were "put on"
[342] through Baptism, so that henceforth the baptized is, no longer
potentially but actually, one with Christ; Christ is in him, and
he is in Christ. The Lord's Supper is indeed on one hand a feast of
fraternal love and recollection, in memory of the Saviour; just as the
adherents of Mithras used to hold their love-feasts (Agape) in memory
of their God's parting feast with his own people. [343] But on the
other hand it is a mystic communion of the blood and body of Christ,
through the drinking of the sacramental chalice and the eating of the
sacramental bread--a mystic communion in no other sense than that in
which the heathens thought they entered into inner connection with
their Gods through sacrificial feasts, and in which savages generally
even to-day believe that through the eating of another's flesh,
be it beast's or man's, and through the drinking of his blood, they
become partakers of the power residing in him. [344] Even for Paul
baptism and the Lord's Supper are to such an extent purely natural
processes or magic practices, that he does not object to the heathen
custom of baptizing, by proxy, living Christians for dead ones; and
in his opinion unworthy eating and drinking of the Lord's Supper
produce sickness and death. [345] In this respect, consequently,
there can be no talk of a "transcending of the naturalism of the
heathen mysteries" in Paul; and to attribute to him a much higher
or more spiritual conception of the sacrament than the heathens had
seems difficult to reconcile with his express statements. [346]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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