Cameron changes his mind about John 6

Cameron Bertuzzi, a YouTuber who converted to Catholicism not long ago, made this post on YouTube linking to this post on substack where he explained how he has changed his mind about whether John 6 teaches transubstantiation. As a protestant, he thought Jesus' statement in John 6:53 about eating his flesh and drinking his blood was a metaphor, but now, as a Catholic, he thinks it's literal. I had a few thoughts on Cameron's post while I was reading it, so I figured I'd go back through and make a blog post about it.

I don't want to talk about everything Cameron said, just a few things that jumped out at me.

Cameron used to think Jesus' statement that "the flesh is of no avail," (vs. 63) undermined a literal interpretation of Jesus' statement that you can have no life in you unless you eat his flesh (vs. 53). I used to think the same thing, but Cameron does make a good point. Since verse 53 refers to "my flesh," but verse 63 refers to "the flesh," they're probably not talking about the same thing. When Jesus said the flesh counts for nothing, that was probably about the fact that you can't have spiritual life by your own effort. You need the quickening power of the Spirit.

Cameron may be right, but it would've been nice if he had explained how his new understanding fits with Jesus' flow of thought in the passage rather than hanging everything on the difference of one word. This is something that jumped out at me throughout Cameron's post. He didn't really explain the passage. He doesn't walk through it or try to make sense of Jesus' flow of thought. I'll cut him some slack, though, because his intention probably wasn't to give a full exegesis of John 6. He just wanted to make a few bullet points.

Cameron no longer thinks the Old Testament command to abstain from drinking blood serves as a good argument against the Catholic position because there are multiple occasions where Jesus superceded cermemonial laws (e.g. regarding the Sabbath, sacrifices, etc.).

I'm not sure that works, though. When Jesus declared all foods clean in Mark 17:18-19, yeah, he did kind of supercede dietary laws, which is why it's okay for Christians to eat bacon. The same thing cannot be said of drinking blood, though. When the apostles had the council in Jerusalem to figure out whether gentile converts had to obey the whole law or not, James explicitly included the command to abstain from blood, and he did not qualify it in any way (Acts 15:19-20). Jesus could not have superceded the command to abstain from drinking blood since that remains a Christian obligation. It's actually pretty striking that James thought this command was important enough to include in his short list of requirements.

Cameron used to think the rabbinic use of metaphor somehow meant Jesus was using a metaphor in John 6, but now he thinks context should decide. I agree with him that context should decide. Unfortunately, Cameron didn't discuss the context. If you read the whole chapter, the context makes it clear that eating and drinking Jesus is a metaphor for coming to and believing in Jesus. Notice the parallel:

6:40: every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

6:54: he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day

Speaking of parallels, there's a strong parallel between Jesus's teaching in John 4 with his teaching in John 6. In John 4, Jesus is talking to a women who wants some water. In John 6, he's talking to a crowd who wants some bread. Jesus uses "living water" as a metaphor in John 4:10, and he uses "living bread" as a metaphor in John 6:51, and they both refer to himself as the source of eternal life. Notice the parallels.

John 4 - woman at the well	John 6 - bread of life discourse
Whoever drinks the water Jesus gives them will never thirst (John 4:14).	Whoever comes to Jesus (the bread of life) will never go hungry or thirst (John 6:35).
Give me this water (John 4:15).	Give us this bread (John 6:34)
Water will give eternal life (John 4:14).	Bread of God gives life to the world (John 6:33)

Cameron goes on to say, "The crowd’s shocked reaction and Jesus’ refusal to correct their literal understanding undermines a purely metaphorical reading." I responded to this statement in a comment on his post, so I'll just cut and paste what I said here.

The point Catholics often make about the fact that had Jesus given his audience the wrong impression, he would have corrected them strikes me as being problematic. Imagine what you would think had you been there. Keep in mind that you don't have the advantage of hindsight. The last supper hasn't happened yet. Is there anything in what Jesus said that would lead you to believe there would be a ritual meal in which actual bread and wine would be converted into the flesh and blood of Jesus while retaining all the properties and appearances of bread and wine? No, there isn't. So what would your impressive have been had you only listened to Jesus tell you that you must eat his flesh and drink his blood in order to have eternal life, and you took him literally? The only conclusion you could have come to was that Jesus means for you to butcher and eat him, i.e. to butcher the actual man standing in front of you, and to eat the meat off his bones and drink the blood that poured out of his wounds. That's why it was so shocking to his listeners.

There's no doubt that's the impression his audience had, and it was the wrong impression even by Catholic standards. Yet, Jesus did not clarify for his audience that what he REALLY meant was that there would be a ritual meal in which actual bread and wine would be turned into the flesh and blood of Jesus while still looking and tasting like bread and wine. If Jesus had made this clarification for his audience, it might've still struck them as being weird, but it would be nowhere near as offensive or off-putting as the impression he left them with.

So the fact that Jesus didn't clarify or correct the wrong impression he left his audience with does not in any way mean that the impression he left them with was true. Whether you're Catholic or protestant, Jesus left his audience with the wrong impression, and he made no effort to clarify. So Catholics should stop using this argument. It doesn't help you.

One more point I'd like to make is that throughout John 6, Jesus is explaining why the crowd doesn't actually believe in him. It's because they were not given to Jesus by the Father (vs. 36-37), and they were not drawn by the Father (John 6:44). After saying, "But there are some of you that do not believe," he explained, "This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father" (John 6:64-65). The reason he told them nobody could come to him unless the Father granted it is because some of them didn't believe. He was explaining their unbelief. Since Jesus was explaining their unbelief, it wouldn't make sense for him to disabuse them of their objection to what Jesus was teaching about himself. Their rejection of Jesus is recorded for us to illustrate their unbelief and to confirm Jesus' teaching about the necessity of the giving and drawing of the Father.

Cameron used to think the issue of bi-location was an insurmountable problem for transubstantiation, but now he thinks this is just a human limitation he was inappropriately applying to God. Since God can perform miracles, he can perform the miracle of bi-location.

This objection makes me question why Cameron thought bi-location was a problem to begin with. Nobody, as far as I know, raises this objection because they don't think God can do miracles. The problem is deeper than that. God's ability to do miracles does not enable him to engage in absurdity. If I told Cameron that God's ability to do miracles should allow him to make married bachelors, I'm sure Cameron would object. The impossibility of bi-location is not a mere human limitation, and I seriously doubt that's what Cameron thought it was when he was a protestant.

The philosophical problems facing transubstantiation go beyond bi-location, too. There is a problem of identity. Allegedly, the first transubstantiation happened at the last supper when Jesus identified the bread with his flesh, then broke it and gave it to his disciples to eat. How could the bread actually be Jesus' flesh?

Suppose Jesus miraculously turned bread into human flesh, which he can surely do since he turned water into wine. What makes it Jesus' flesh rather than, say, Peter's flesh? If Jesus had wanted to make it somebody else's flesh, what could he have done differently? If all Jesus did was turn the bread into human flesh, there isn't anything that could make it the flesh of somebody in particular.

If I created an exact duplicate of the Mona Lisa, my duplicate would not be the actual Mona Lisa no matter how good of a job I did. It would just be a replica. There's nothing God himself could do to cause my replica be the same object as the original Mona Lisa sitting in the Lourvre. In the same way, there's nothing Jesus could've done to a loaf of bread to cause it to be one person's flesh rather than another person's flesh. The problem isn't that it's a miracle. The problem is that it's a violation of identity. It's very similar to the problem Jehovah's Witnesses face when it comes to resurrection and the problem Captain Kirk faces when using a transporter.

There's another way Jesus might've performed a transubstantiation, though, besides turning the bread and wine into flesh and blood. He could've created a miracle in which the bread and wine instantaneously poofed out of existence while simultaneously causing flesh and blood to poof into existence in exactly the same location. This idea is similar to how wood becomes petrified by replacing wood with minerals, molecule by molecule, except that it happens instantaneously. But this scenario creates the same problem of identity. In this scenario, flesh and blood are being created ex nihilo to replace the bread and wine, and there is nothing that can make the flesh and blood be Jesus' flesh and blood rather than somebody else's or nobody's at all.

Jesus did not lose any body parts when he fed the disciples that night. So whatever the disciples ate or drank, however it was created, it wasn't literally Jesus' flesh and blood. Cameron says that philosophical discomfort doesn't dictate theological truth. I wonder if Cameron's philosophical discomfort with married bachelors still dictates what he thinks God can or can't do.

I think transubstantiation is to Catholics what the Book of Abraham is to Latter Day Saints. It is essential to Catholicism because it is essential to the Mass. It is the most obviously false doctrine of all the teachings of the Catholic church, and since it is essential, it utterly undermines Catholicism. I found Cameron's responses to his old objections so weak that it makes me wonder what was going through his head back when he used those objections.

I've written on this subject a few other times, so I'll leave a few links here for further reading.

Transubstantiation This is my opening to a debate I had on this subject.

Catholic vs. protestant interpretation of John 6 This is my opening to a debate on a broader topic that includes transubstantiation.

An Argument Against Transubstantiation This is something I wrote a long long time ago on a message board that used to exist on Stand to Reason's website.

Catholics and Communion This is a post on Stand to Reason's old blog in which I argued with some people about transubstantiation. I'm "Sam" in the comment section.