There is no shortage of counters to the literal reading of Jesus’ words “eat my flesh . . . drink my blood” (John 6:54-58). One form these counters take is showing that such a literal reading entails an absurdity.
Protestant Pastor Todd Baker makes this kind of argument in his book Exodus from Rome, Volume I. Consider how Jesus says in the preceding context, in John 6:35, that “he who comes to me shall not hunger” and “he who believes in me shall not thirst”—the implication being that the preservation from hunger and thirst is due to some kind of eating and drinking.
Baker appeals to this verse and argues that if Catholics interpret literally Jesus’ command to eat his flesh and drink his blood, then we would have to conclude that we will never physically hunger or thirst, which is absurd. Here’s Baker in his own words:
When the Catholic maintains that the bread and wine [are] the actual flesh and blood of Christ to be eaten and drunk, he must also take the words of verse 35 to be literal as well. So when Christ said “I Am the Bread of Life,” and Catholics believe they are literally eating his flesh and drinking his blood in the Eucharist, they should never physically hunger or thirst again once they have done so for the first time. . . . If Jesus’ words about bread in John 6:35 were indeed to be taken literally, a Catholic should only have to eat this bread once so that he will never physically hunger or thirst again! Obviously this does not happen.
We can summarize Baker’s argument as follows:
Premise 1: If Jesus intended for us to literally eat his flesh and drink his blood, then he would have intended the preservation from hunger and thirst to be a preservation from physical hunger and thirst.
Premise 2: But that’s absurd. We obviously physically hunger and thirst.
Conclusion: Therefore, Jesus’ words weren’t meant to be taken literally.
The key premise is premise one. So our responses will be given accordingly.
There’s an assumed principle in Baker’s argument that must be brought to the fore: a spiritual effect necessarily involves a spiritual cause. To Baker, since the effect is never spiritually hungering and thirsting, the cause must be a spiritual eating and drinking, which Baker identifies as belief in Jesus.
But why should we believe the above principle? Why should we believe that a spiritual effect demands a spiritual cause? Baker doesn’t say. He merely assumes its truth. Unless we’re told why we should believe this principle, we can simply reject it.
Now, we have good reason to think the principle is in fact false.Consider, for example, how, on Baker’s view, never spiritually hungering and thirsting is an effect of belief in Jesus. Well, wouldn’t that belief ordinarily involve a physical act of verbally professing faith in Jesus Christ? As Paul says, “For man believes with his heart and so is justified, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved” (Rom. 10:10). Confessing faith in Christ with our lips is a physical act. I assume that Baker would accept this teaching.
If the physical act of verbally confessing faith in Christ doesn’t demand a physical effect, but brings about a spiritual effect, then why must the physical act of eating Christ’s body in the Eucharist bring about a physical effect? Why can’t this physical act bring about a spiritual effect, like the physical act of confessing faith in Christ?
For Baker to exclude, without a principled reason, the physical act of eating Christ’s body in the Eucharist from bringing about the spiritual effect of never spiritually hungering and thirsting but allow the physical act of confessing faith in Christ to bring about such a spiritual effect is a bit arbitrary. In philosophy, we call that the fallacy of special pleading.
We Catholics can agree with Baker that the “eating” and “drinking” that Jesus refers to in verse 35 is not meant to be taken literally. The reason is that Jesus explicitly tells us what the eating and drinking refer to: “He who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst.”
When Jesus starts talking in verse 51 about eating his flesh (“I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh”) and following, he never backtracks to these ideas of coming to him and believing in him. And doing so would have been very beneficial to quell the difficulty that his audience was having with the teaching—especially his disciples, who already believed.
Instead, Jesus sticks with the “flesh and blood” language. He’s not using the eating and drinking language as he did in verse 35. Something new has been introduced into the conversation, and it’s the act of eating his flesh and blood. (I explain this point in further detail in my book Meeting the Protestant Response: How to Answer Common Comebacks to Catholic Arguments.)
I applaud Baker for following the principle that if our interpretation of Jesus’ words leads to absurdities, then we ought to reject such an interpretation. However, Baker doesn’t succeed in applying this principle to the issue at hand: the literal interpretation of Jesus’ words “eat my flesh . . . drink my blood.”
***This article was originally published by Catholic Answers Magazine Online on April 9, 2024.