#12478 Who Thought the Eucharist Was Just Symbolic? Early Church Beliefs and Transubstantiation (ENCORE) - Joe Heschmeyer

Catholic Answers Live

Catholic Answers

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2025

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Who Thought the Eucharist Was Just Symbolic? ” This episode delves into the early Church’s beliefs about the Eucharist, exploring questions like the origins of the symbolic view and whether early Church Fathers spoke symbolically. We also tackle the significance of “breaking bread” in the early Church and the implications of transubstantiation.

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Questions Covered:

03:30 – Where did the symbolic view of the Eucharist come from?
05:13 – Didn’t some early Church Fathers speak symbolically about the Eucharist? Doesn’t that challenge the idea of unanimous early belief?
07:30 – Didn’t the disciples fail to object during the Last Supper because they understood Jesus metaphorically?
09:00 – If “breaking bread” was common in the early Church, doesn’t that just suggest a fellowship meal, not a literal body and blood?
15:25 – The Eucharist doesn’t seem to do anything to believers?
20:30 – How Do I Properly Receive the Eucharist?
21:50 – How does transubstantiation actually work—and why does it rely on medieval Aristotelian philosophy rather than Scripture?
29:05 – How do we know that the early Church actually believed in transubstantiation and not just a spiritual or symbolic presence? Why does the Catholic View win out?
35:22 – The priesthood is against going directly to God. We don’t need Earthly priests.
42:20 – Does the Eucharist cause more division than Unity?
48:08 – Is the Eucharist just an adaptation of pagan rituals?

Transcript

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0:00.0	Buying or selling your home, real estate for life can connect you with a pro-life real estate agent.
0:05.2	When Real Estate for Life receives a referral fee, they donate 65% to Catholic Answers.
0:11.5	Learn more at realestateforlife.org. Welcome back to Catholic Answers Live. I am Cy Kellett. Your host, Joe Heschmeyer, is our guest. We're running through, as we were last hour, all the objections to the Eucharist.
0:40.3	The Catholic Church has a well-developed teaching on the Eucharist, one that a second grader can understand, at least well enough, to consent to receiving communion.
0:52.3	But someone who has studied for, I don't know, say, 100, 150 years,
0:58.6	I don't know how old people are living these days, you still will only be just scratching the
1:03.2	surface. You will not penetrate the full depths. Not in this life, you won't.. So yes or no to my description of?
1:13.1	Oh, very much so. I mean, the whole image of the heavenly liturgy is centered around the wedding banquet of the lamb.
1:22.7	And so there's this sense in which heaven itself is sort of an unpacking of what's happening in the Eucharist.
1:30.2	So, yeah, I'm probably just, the, the images just keep opening new horizons for you.
1:41.3	Yeah.
1:41.5	I mean, there's a reason, one of the promises in the book of Revelation is that to the
1:45.8	one who triumphs, he'll receive a stone with a name on it known only to God and hidden
1:49.8	mana.
1:50.9	There's something intensely personal about that.
1:54.0	You know, Adam's first job in naming the animals in the garden, you create a kind of relationship
1:58.1	in naming.
1:59.1	This is why you tend to name your pets and not name the
2:02.1	livestock you're going to eat. Yeah, oh, it's don't name the livestock. Exactly. And so,
2:08.9	you know, name changes are huge in the Bible. The fact that you have a special name known only to
2:13.8	God means like the height of like the personal relational intimacy is expressed with
2:19.9	that image and the hidden manna, which is a very eucharistic kind of image.
	...

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