NeinCoffee

The biggest functional difference between Mormonism and the original Christianity of the first and second centuries, is not the Trinity. It is not the creeds. It is the Eucharist. That sounds wrong at first, because the Trinity is where all the noxious public fighting happens. (I am thinking about @ThoughtfulSaint righteously battling the hordes and haters) Mormons and Baptists disagree about nearly everything concerning the nature of God. One believes in an embodied Father, the other calls that blasphemy. Yet drop either one into the other's communion service and he would feel at home. Bread as emblem. A quiet moment of remembering. The action understood by everyone in the room as memorial. Now take Rome and the East, who have not shared communion in nearly a thousand years and still argue about the Trinity down to a single Latin word. Their altars make the identical claim. The flesh of Christ is on this table. So the true fault line of Christianity does not run through the creeds. It runs through the table. Why does that matter? Because the difference between symbol and flesh is not liturgical taste. It changes everything underneath. If the bread is a symbol, then communion is something you do. You remember Christ. You reflect on the cross. You stir up what gratitude you can. The grace rises and falls with the quality of your own devotion that morning, and the whole action runs from your mind toward heaven. If the bread is his flesh, the action runs the other way. Christ does something to you. He that eateth me, even he shall live by me. The same life that pours from the Father into the Son pours into your body, whether you are blazing with the spirit or barely awake. One is a religion where man climbs toward God on a ladder of thoughts. The other is a religion where God descends into a human mouth. Those are not two versions of the same result. A symbolic Eucharist reverses the Incarnation. It says God came in flesh once, briefly, and then withdrew to the realm of thoughts and feelings, where nothing bleeds. The real presence says the Incarnation never stopped. God still insists on meeting you in matter, because matter is how he made you and matter is how he saved you. To illustrate everything: a soldier on deployment kisses the picture of his wife every night. But no one tells him it is the same as holding her. If Christ is truly present in the real eucharist, then every memorialist communion (protestants and mormons), however sincere, is a man kissing the photograph while the beloved could stand in the room and kiss back. That is the tragedy of the symbol, and that is why the question matters. Not because Rome enjoys winning arguments about metaphysics, but because a person is either there or he is not, and everything about how you love someone turns on which it is.