Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of the Church, Part 10.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been talking about the doctrine of the sacraments, in particular, the Lord's Supper. And last time we examined

the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, perhaps the most radical interpretation of the

Lord's Supper. You'll recall that we saw that Catholics believe that when the bread and the wine are consecrated

by the priest, they literally are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Although they don't

appear to us as flesh and blood, they really are in their substance.

They merely have the accidental properties of bread and wine, but in fact they are the body and blood of Christ.

That, however, doesn't exhaust the importance of the Eucharist,

or the Lord's Supper, for Roman Catholics, because there's another very important

facet of their doctrine that needs to be emphasized, and that is that the Eucharist or the Mass is a sacrifice

which is offered to God. In early church history, the church father Iranaeus, whose dates are 130 to 202, who was the bishop of Lyon in France,

characterized the Lord's Supper as a thank offering, which believers offer to God. It's an offering of

thanksgiving to God for what he has done. During the third

century after Christ, however, in the West, the view of the Eucharist as a right of thanksgiving

began to give way to the belief that this was a propitiatory or expiatory sacrifice offered to God.

You'll remember when we talked about the doctrine of Christ and we looked at the work of Christ,

we saw that Christ's atoning death is a propitiation

for our sins. That is to say, it satisfies divine justice and allays the wrath of God.

It's also expiatory in the sense that it cleanses us of our sin.

In the Roman Catholic Church, the doctrine developed that when the Mass is celebrated and the body

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