Concepts of Christ in Ancient and Modern Times

Now, when you consider that in the 6th century they actually no longer knew anything about the spiritual Christ, then you will also understand why in the Middle Ages - in the 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th centuries, and then a little later - they suddenly began to argue: What does it actually mean, this thing called the Lord's Supper? It only means something to the one who accepts a picture of the spiritual. But they were no longer able to do that; so now they argued. Some said: On the altar in the church, the bread really does change into the body of Christ. The others did not believe this, because they could not imagine that the bread, which looked exactly the same afterwards as it did before, had become flesh. They could not understand this. And so those medieval disputes arose, which led to such terrible results. For those who said: It is all the same to us whether people understand the matter or not, we believe that the bread is real flesh – that was the one party that became Roman Catholics. The others said: We cannot believe that, but at most what happens can have the meaning, the symbolic meaning. – Those were the ones from whom Protestantism then arose.