Can a Recovering Alcoholic Ever Drink Again

If Jesus is actually present in the Eucharist and so does that make it safety for a recovering alcoholic to receive the consecrated vino, given that the wine is no longer actually wine but the "blood of Christ"? To answer that question it's necessary to defend the intelligibility of the doctrine of the real presence, and to appraise its implications for those of united states of america who, were bodily wine to pass our lips, would end up back on that familiar screw of despair known every bit "relapse".

There is a significant bespeak of schism betwixt the Catholic and Protestant traditions concerning what is actually happening at the Eucharistic celebration. Is the re-enactment of the Concluding Supper symbolic or literal?

Scripture first, and then the metaphysics.

In the very strange Chapter six of the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to himself as the bread of life. He goes on to clarify:

"My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me. And I in him." (John ,half-dozen, 55-56).

There are persuasive scriptural reasons for believing that Jesus meant this literally, not least considering many of his followers deserted him at this betoken, appalled at an apparent invitation to cannibalism. Every bit the theologian Robert Barron has pointed out, it was quite clear when Jesus was offer a metaphor, and every bit obvious when he wasn't. His correction of Nicodemus over what it meant to be "built-in again" being a instance in point.

And, of course, at the Terminal Supper, the strangest dinner political party in history, Jesus doubles down and initiates the Eucharistic institution. He offers himself as the sacrificial lamb of God, and announces that the bread at the meal is his body and that the wine is his blood, poured out for the many for the forgiveness of sin. How is a literal reading of this defensible? Well, if you are a theist there is no problem at all. And to merits that Our Lord was offering mere symbolism is in fact to implicitly claim that he was not God simply, equally CS Lewis would say, therefore either mad or bad.

The Oxford philosopher JL Austin wrote about speech acts. He pointed out that language has a performative as well equally a descriptive function. There are times when nosotros say things that don't only draw the world simply fundamentally change it. When a police officeholder says "you are under arrest" and so, just because he has used those words, the globe changes and you are non going habitation. When a groom says at his nuptials "I practise", then his world is transformed, occasionally for the better (so I am told, wasn't truthful in my case – or hers either come to that).

How much more transformational could a speech human action be when it is God doing the speaking? The first ii capacity of Genesis itemise a sequence of divine speech acts. "And God said…". And the first chapter of John tells us that in the commencement was the Word…

God did not set the world up and so dorsum off to watch. God speaks the world into existence at present and he sustains it from moment to moment. He is more of a narrator than an builder. Then, when God, in the grade of Jesus Christ, speaks the bread into his flesh and the wine into his claret, then by that act of speech communication these things are made true. And when the priest at Mass, interim in persona Christi, repeats the Eucharistic initiation then the Last Supper is moved into the present moment. The wine becomes quite literally the claret of Christ.

What does "quite literally" hateful? Equally with all things sacramental the answer is to be found in the defining theology of St Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas offered to the church a modified Aristotelian metaphysics. Central to this is a distinction between substantial and adventitious form. The substantial form of something is, roughly, its essence. What it is to be a cat is to exist a member of a species. The accidental form might be the color of the cat. Some cats are ginger, some are black. Some are big-headed, some are intolerably big-headed. What happens in the Mass is transubstantiation: a change in substantial grade conjoined with a preservation of adventitious form. The bread and the wine are transformed, substantially, into the body and blood of Christ. But they retain their contingent, accidental properties: they still look like staff of life and still taste like wine.

So, should I drink the wine or not?

My PhD supervisor was a Berkleyan idealist, which is to say that he didn't believe in the existence of affair. He argued that what we remember of as "solid material objects" are no more than collections of experiences, held together in the listen of God. So, technically, he did not believe in the being of his ain body. This did non preclude him from being a hypochondriac. And on 1 occasion when I was driving him from Liverpool to Oxford he told me that I was too close to the car in front end. When I asked him why he was so concerned given that the car in front didn't materially exist he replied: "the phenomena are simply as risky".

I've decided I will not be taking the communion wine considering even though it is in substantial form the blood of Christ, the accidental form is – to a recovering alcoholic – nevertheless pretty risky.

And, with all due respect to Our Lord, I know for a fact that its accidental property of "how it tastes" is pretty obnoxious.