Did the early church believe in the real presence of Christ in the Lord's supper or did they believe it was merely a symbol? Here is one article that begins to pry open what the early Christians believed.
Did Tertullian Deny the Real Presence?
In the comments to this post, a Protestant calling himself "meyu" claimed that there wasn't any consensus in the early Church on the Real Presence. Since I've actually written on this subject before, I challenged him on this. After all, I've shown Church Fathers explicitly affirming the Real Presence in the first and second century, the third century, and the fourth century. Even the Jews and Romans were aware that the Christians believed that the Eucharist was actually Jesus.
Of course, if these Church Fathers are wrong, they're blasphemously wrong: they're either encouraging people to worship Jesus or to worship an idol of bread and wine. Yet nobody in the Church disagrees with them: no remotely-orthodox Christian writes against the Eucharist as idolatry. Everyone who writes on the subject writes in a way that's compatible with Catholicism, oftentimes in ways that are undeniably explicit in teaching the Real Presence.
For the rest of the article, click here.
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