Lloyd-Jones: Roman Catholics have woven a great philosophy round transubstantiation.

Roman Catholics have woven a great philosophy round transubstantiation. If you ask: ‘How can that happen, because I still see something that looks like bread, which is white and has the texture of bread and tastes like bread?’ their reply is that that is perfectly correct. But they add that anything that you see can be divided into two main sections or divisions—the substance and the accidents.

Now as I have said, I do not want to go into this in detail, but I do think that it is important that we should know something about it because there are so many people today who say that they have been blessed by such teaching. And you will always find that when true Protestantism is lifeless and lethargic there is a strange attraction for some people in sacramental teaching where you have nothing to do but receive the bread and it acts almost automatically.

So, this view says that the whiteness of bread does not belong to the substance of bread but is one of the accidents, as are the texture and the taste, and the substance can be changed without affecting the accidents. So it is believed that the substance of bread is no longer what it was, but by a miracle becomes the actual body of the Lord. And, of course, believing that the bread is now essentially the body of the Lord, Roman Catholics put it in a special vessel; they worship it; they address their prayers to it; they call it ‘the host’ and carry the host in processions.

Now there is no need for us to stay with this because even the Roman Catholic Church herself is prepared to admit that the doctrine cannot be proved from the Scriptures. They try to lay great emphasis on the fact that our Lord said, ‘This is my body’ (Luke 22:19). That ‘is’, they say, is all-important. They say that He did not say, ‘This represents my body,’ but, ‘This is my body,’ and you must take His words literally. There are many obvious answers to that. There was our Lord standing in His body, so how could He therefore mean that the bread that was in front of Him was actually His body? He was speaking in the body at the time and there was bread in His hand. That is one answer.

But there is another, and in many ways a more powerful, answer and one which the Roman Catholics can never deal with. Our Lord later goes on to say, ‘This cup is the new testament in my blood’ (Luke 22:20) and you can say to them that if they insist upon the ‘is’ in the one case they must insist upon it in the other. Therefore the wine does not matter at all, but it is the cup that matters because He said ‘this cup’, not the wine in the cup. Of course, there is no answer to that. In other words, the attempt to base this doctrine of transubstantiation upon that one word is not only unscriptural but is, indeed, unreasonable. The fact is that the whole doctrine came into the Church simply in order to enhance the position and the status of the priests. It is only the priest who can work this miracle and, as he alone can do it, he becomes correspondingly more important.

Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (1998). The church and the last things (pp. 48–49). Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books.

John Stott on the "old man" and the "body ruled by sin" in Rom 6 v 6

There are, in fact, two quite distinct ways in which the New Testament speaks of crucifixion in relation to holiness. The first is our death to sin through identification with Christ; the second is our death to self through imitation of Christ. On the one hand, we have been crucified with Christ. But on the other we have crucified (decisively repudiated) our sinful nature with all its desires, so that every day we renew this attitude by taking up our cross and following Christ to crucifixion. The first is a legal death, a death to the penalty of sin; the second is a moral death, a death to the power of sin. The first belongs to the past, and is unique and unrepeatable; the second belongs to the present, and is repeatable, even continuous. I died to sin (in Christ) once; I die to self (like Christ) daily. It is with the first of these two deaths that Romans 6 is chiefly concerned, although the first is with a view to the second, and the second cannot take place w...

Berkoff: "The law was not substituted for the promise; neither was faith supplanted by works. "

The giving of the law did not effect a fundamental change in the religion of Israel, but merely introduced a change in its external form. The law was not substituted for the promise; neither was faith supplanted by works. Many of the Israelites, indeed, looked upon the law in a purely legalistic spirit and sought to base their claim to salvation on a scrupulous fulfillment of it as a body of external precepts. But in the case of those who understood its real nature, who felt the inwardness and spirituality of the law, it served to deepen the sense of sin and to sharpen the conviction that salvation could be expected only from the grace of God . L. Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans publishing co., 1938), 498–499.

F.F. Bruce: ...know their father's will...

The NT does not contain a detailed code of rules for the Christian. Codes of rules, as Paul explains elsewhere, are suited to the period of immaturity when the children of God are still under guardians; but children who have come to years of responsibility know their father’s will without having to be provided with a long list of “Do’s” and “Don’t’s.” What the NT does provide is those basic principles of Christian living which may be applied to varying situations of life as they arise. So, after answering the Corinthian Christians’ question about the eating of food that has been offered to idols, Paul sums up his advice in the words: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). Phrases current in worship, like “to the glory of God” or (as here) “in the name of the Lord Jesus,” were given a practical relevance by being applied to the concerns of ordinary life. Bruce, F. F. (1984). The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the...

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